“... so that it drops to the turf at his feet; in another, he feints to cross the ball with his left foot and in the same motion releases it in the opposite direction with his right; again and again, he carries the ball at speed into the heart of Villarreal’s defence, guarding and propelling it with delicate touches as the defenders back-pedal before ...”

“... a Common Future: Connecting, Innovating, Transforming’. It is to be held in Kigali, hosted by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president for the last two decades: proof enough of his continued good standing in the West. In Britain and beyond, he is credited with ending the genocide of 1994 – ‘one of the fastest killing sprees in human history’, as Michela ...”

“... the press has a variegated record on miscarriages of justice. At its best it has journalists like Paul Foot who have doggedly reinvestigated cases nobody else would listen to. At its worst the press can be a source of prejudice that, as the case of the Taylor sisters powerfully demonstrates, actually promotes miscarriages of justice. Between these poles ...”

“... it not be said, however, that I’m one of those part-time, long-distance fans who’s never set foot inside Old Trafford. I went in 1977, when I was nine. Bristol City, during their brief spell in the top division, squeezed an away win: it was divine retribution for disloyalty to my hometown. The reason I’m a Manchester United supporter is that my father ...”

“... not consciously marred by what I took to be a moderately virulent outbreak of athlete’s foot, caused by too many visits to my swimming club, in a prep school where term began in early September. After a week or three I went to my GP and told her I thought I had athlete’s foot. Amid pleasant chat of this and that ...”

“... studio hangs a much smaller, more enigmatic painting called The Sea, Goa. Measuring barely a foot across, it seems at first glance to consist of nothing more than three horizontal stripes of scarlet red and cobalt blue, stacked at the bottom of the panel, in landscape orientation. The horizontal grain of the wood showing in the top half of the ...”

“... of my own, as the only person I know who was at school in the 1980s is R. and he never set foot in the gym anyway. But the imagination can’t be subject to plebiscite. Take a poll of all the playwrights at the National and you wouldn’t find one whose lover had shredded their masterpiece, fed it into the stove and then gone out and shot ...”

“... cries. No lip-service to democratic legitimacy here. I was unaware until subsequently reading Paul Foot in the Guardian that Macdonald started somewhere to the left of Stalin and Trotsky together, so that to the cry of Blairite cronyism can be added a still louder cry of class treachery. But what of it? David Kirkwood, one of the original Red ...”

“... of that earth house I inheritedA stack of singular, cold memory-weightsTo load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.Where ‘Act of Union’ labours to deliver its sexual-political analogy, this douzain has a light abruptness. In ‘Squarings’ Heaney is happy to settle for approximations (‘maybe’, ‘dampish’) and gestural incompleteness ...”

“... paintings, artful as political posters, but artless as art. A crudely painted image of a foot kicking soldiers into the air calls for the ‘Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and puppet troops from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia!’ Another work tells the story of EPAS, the joint Apollo-Soyuz flight of 1975, symbolic of the new ...”

“... up.’ ‘With your father’s wonderful wit too, I see!’ she said. I looked up and saw that Paul, her son, who was at my school but a year older, was sitting at the top of the stairs, behind the bannisters. He was smiling at me. On the way to Cheryl’s I’d deliberately excluded him from my mind. I hadn’t believed that he would be in, that he would ...”

“... are turned into actors. They have got to choose an image, and then ‘project’ it. Michael Foot insisted on looking like what he is – ‘the corduroy, the wool tie, the academic’s white hair’ – and was duly run off the court by ‘the warrior queen ... her hair lacquered into Britannia’s golden helmet’. In modern times, York argues, it’s ...”

“... recycling den: in one corner, hundreds of fridges, piled up like sugarcubes; in another, a fifteen-foot-high mountain of wires, print cartridges, computer parts, monitors, photocopiers. Shipping containers are propped on top of one another and used as offices, kitchens, laboratories and the living quarters of the disappeared labour force: four, five, even six ...”

“... Paul Watkins’s novel and Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque are second books by young British writers whose work has been well-received in America, to which, together with its surrounding seas, both of these writers have been drawn. Paul Watkins used, they say, to set off from Eton for spells on an oil rig, and after graduating from Yale he fished for three years off the New England coast, where this novel of his is located ...”

“... been serving champagne – gather around Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, a six-foot-high bright red canvas with a metre-long vertical slit down its middle. ‘Do you think anyone’s noticed it’s damaged?’ one of them asks. The question isn’t silly. When you come across one of Fontana’s works from the turn of the 1960s in the ...”