“... house creaking under the wind assaults. I straightened my legs, so the blanket ebbed and my right foot rose out of the sludge of darkness like a squat, extinguished lighthouse. The blinds gibbered for a moment, commenting on my performance, then settled in silence. Usually the writing’s a bit calmer. Hemon’s sense of humour generally comes to the rescue ...”

“... see them reproduced in a study of Balthus’s work.Alice shows a woman precariously posed with one foot raised on a chair, carefully combing her hair, careless of a breast that has escaped from her shift and of her genital area visible below it. For Sabine Rewald, writing in the excellent catalogue of the 1984 exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum in New ...”

“... King Arthur) to Æthelred (Æthelstan’s great-nephew), omitting Æthelstan entirely. When Eric John surveyed the tenth century for The Anglo-Saxons (1982), he focused on Edgar, Æthelstan’s nephew. Since then, attention has shifted to Alfred’s achievements, and those of his son Edward the Elder, with Michael Wood alone making the case for ...”

“... Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine ...”

“... frightened, distressed, and with a story about missing time. They sensed something strange at the foot of the bed, they saw something strange at the side of the road – then it’s two hours later and they are in the wrong place with no idea how they got there. They are heading south on the wrong highway and the tank is still full of gas. They wake with the ...”

“... cue like a club. If you are right-handed, the right leg will take the strain as you bend. The left foot should point in the direction of your shot. Keeping as low as possible reduces the possibility of movement. The cue arm should glide freely back and forth, rather like a pendulum, but only the forearm should move; the bridge-hand is spread rigid on the cloth ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... back the roller-skate: the bad state of the roads. The first hobby-horse riders chose to use the foot pavements, thus sparking the sort of ‘pavement rage’ which increasingly has its outbursts today. At least the riders of the high bicycle, or ‘penny-farthing’, knew better than to ride their towering contraptions through the closely-packed ranks of ...”

“... auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the national cerebellum, they were very much intensified ...”

“... And even the best of our teachers could be seen gripping the floor strenuously with the supporting foot, which seemed to me to be cheating. The next and final phase in this unwitting crash-course in the history of modern dance technique was Release, which emerged from the experiments in natural movement made by dancers who rebelled (from Cunningham mostly) in ...”

“... I don’t think they flow from his religious commitment. In giving his own interpretation of John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Faith and Reason’, MacIntyre says: It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to ...”

“... the USPS, Lennon picks up the low hum of the invisible republic. Like the eavesdropping couple in John Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’, Mailman is a psychic receiver for the secrets of those around him. His precious archive of photocopied mail, built up over many years of invading his customers’ privacy, is the main reason for his emotional attachment ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following two decades.As John Davis points out, the idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were taking shape that would eventually ...”