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“... Donne’s powers are, for John Carey, a matter of power, the poems being ‘the most enduring exhibition of the will to power the English Renaissance produced’. The praises of Donne in this critical work of amazing flair and obduracy are single-minded: Donne is here valued, supremely, for the power and tenacity of his ego, for his imaginative energy, for his desire to dominate or his rage for supremacy, and for the obsession with which he registered the contrarieties and contradictions of life ‘in all their urgent discord ...”

“... with Memoirs from the Declaration of the War with Spain’, begun in 1746, now first published by John Brooke as an appendix to his edition. The title is misleading, for these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... of marginal notes on early English printed pages – Bibles, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, Sir John Harington and so on. She is more pedestrian than McGann, but more convincing. When the sound-stream of language can be represented graphically, symbolic gestures (swearing on the Book) and the use of the text itself as a visual symbol become ...”

“... of being the first in the field. Since he (or rather, his selfless literary executor, Michael Foot) shook off the chains of conventional Cabinet secrecy and got volume one into print, there have been successors. Every minister knew, at the time when all these notebooks and tapes were being compiled round poor old Harold Wilson’s Cabinet table, that ...”

“... The silhouette of Cesar Augusto Sandino, his hands clasped behind his back, his left foot pointing outwards, wearing high-laced army boots and a ten-gallon hat, is the universal emblem of Nicaragua’s revolutionary movement. In the 1920s Sandino led a prolonged guerrilla campaign against the US marines who had been occupying his country since 1912 ...”

“... True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them ... ’ Syed Omar, we find, is tight-wedged between his sleeping wives – ‘most irregular, uncleanly, contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is defied by Kenneth ...”

“... a fortitude as ever in the past.’ Only Edgar Evans died a rather commonplace death – at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, of concussion after a fall. ‘He died a natural death,’ was all Scott could manage by way of an epitaph for him in the last message, but then Evans was only a petty officer, not a gentleman like the rest, and had slept on the ...”

“... manner I almost ever saw,’ she wrote to Thackeray the following day. ‘Mr Clough sat at the foot of my sofa with this keen expression of investigation, which I determined not to mind, & only thought him un-understandable.’ Part of what unnerved Clough’s contemporaries – in his verse as well as in life – was his talent for scissoring through the ...”

“... countries? They’d gone to the Germany-Poland border, finding something appealing in setting foot in two countries, and as they walked they played a game they’d apparently played on the way to primary school every morning, of times-table questions they would pass back and forth. (I envied him in this: as the last child, he played many such games with ...”

“... of the Auvergne château to ground level, where the speed attained threw its cargo up round a ten-foot-high loop. The ‘passengers’, stuck inside a wheeled wooden box, were rabbits and chickens, and the idea was to demonstrate centripetal force; before and after each trip the animals’ eyes were examined to see if the experience had produced greater ...”

“... and six possibilities for the kind of paper on which Jack Kerouac typed out the original hundred-foot scroll of On the Road (teletype paper, Japanese drawing paper, oilskin art paper, shelf-paper, canister-paper, tracing paper). He finds strands of Kerouac’s road romance throughout the Beat legend. Tangled up in the story, as usual, is the Beat ...”

“... change – social nuance not being something you could reasonably expect from a journey on foot in the Dark Ages. Sheltering from the rain in a dilapidated Roman villa, Axl and Beatrice interrupt, and seek to resolve, an argument between an old woman and a ferryman. She accuses him of taking her husband across the water to an island without returning ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly ...”

“... unworthy prostitute,I blush for you.The English throne is sullied,vile bastard, by your foot!Some of this, especially the opera as performed with fervid and overwrought passion by Joan Sutherland as Mary and Huguette Tourangeau as Elizabeth and Pavarotti as Leicester, can take me straight back to my youth. The best music for that, however, is by ...”