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“... 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 ...”

“... Rutherford Robertson reminds us in his eloquent foreword, Parkinson was the first artist to set foot on Australian soil – a series of appraisals of different aspects of Parkinson’s work by 11 leading scholars has been brought between two covers, accompanied by a magnificent selection of his drawings and by authoritative notes recounting the often ...”

“... select, breasts – elbows,      what else is allowed by the vebal smash-up piled under foot. Crush tread trample distinguish put your choice in the hands of the town clerk, the army stuffing its drum. Rubbish is    pertinent; essential; the    most intricate presence in    our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole ...”

“... he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive’ at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was ...”

“... gainful employment elsewhere, but preferred to match themselves against the succession of 700-foot dunes. He well knew that blood feuds raged among the tribes, and says that if anyone had killed one of his companions he would unquestionably have sought to avenge him: ‘I have no belief in the “sanctity” of life.’ Soon the oil men came to desecrate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and passionate studies of economy, politics and culture by social historians as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”