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“... I heard that Lee Meng had been caught and condemned to hang. All appeals had failed. Dingle Foot was leading a campaign in Britain to save her, so I caught a train to London and told him this tale. Could I prove it? I could not. Did I know the marine’s name? I didn’t. Although my attempt to help was futile, the campaign went on. Then, quite ...”

“... tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a conversation about ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”

“... and wisps of sandy hair. To the soldiers he was ‘Twinkle-toes’, from the way he dragged one foot when he walked. He could be quick-tempered when he detected inefficiency, and, in matters of discipline, he upheld the severest sentences. Normally he was soft-spoken, and it was with the dreamiest of gestures that, his eyelids partly closed against the ...”

“... come and gone like shadows – Jim, the soccer star, had vanished, And Joe, the pensive one, and John, of calculus the gloomy hero … She flirted and procrastinated, toyed superficially with love, but in her heart awaited more. 16 Inevitably comes the day; He’s leaving, the ethereal friend: the bill is paid, exams are done with, the tennis racket in its ...”

“... about to take over the known world. Until a month ago, the United States seemed unable to put a foot wrong. Then it, too, showed ominous signs of faltering. Can Japan’s mysterious ailment, whatever it is, be spreading? Japan came third last in the OECD’s table of industrialised and would-be industrialised member nations’ growth for 1999, with 0.2 per ...”

“... one point he issued a fatwa justifying the murder of Christians, to make it possible for his young foot-soldiers to fund their jihad by killing and robbing Coptic businessmen with a clear conscience. In 1993, in New York, his followers detonated a massive van bomb in the basement car park of the World Trade Center, gouging a 200 ...”

“... wild, wick slip she was – but, she had the bonniest eye, and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish; and, after all, I believe she meant no harm; for when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she would not keep you company; and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her.A confident new female voice lets rip ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.Desset is adamant that without ...”

“... John Leslie comes to tell us that the end of the world is closer than we think. His book is no ordinary millennial manifesto, however. Leslie is a sophisticated philosopher of science, and the source of his message is not divine revelation, apocalyptic fantasy or anxiety about the year-2000 computer problem, but ‘the Doomsday Argument’ – an a priori argument that seeks support in probability theory ...”

“... soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then John Gummer, notoriously fed his daughter a beefburger on television. It became clear, too, that in some way officialdom was leaning on the vets and scientists in officialdom’s pay, telling them to damp down their cries of alarm. ‘They didn’t seem to want ...”

“... awash with Dante translations: Laurence Binyon’s in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, John Ciardi’s in 1955, Mark Musa’s in 1971, C.H. Sisson’s in 1980, not to mention an Inferno by assorted poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... Abbey’ as a ‘post-revolutionary’ work. Roe argues the poem is haunted by the spirit of John Thelwall, the radical orator who was extremely popular in the 1790s and to whom Roe’s book is dedicated. In 1798 Thelwall was living a few miles away from Tintern Abbey, having retired from political engagement after the wave of arrests which followed the ...”