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“... spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by fighters, falling from high altitude over Korea: ‘There were a dozen or more, going down like thin cries ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... it in an evening light, as the stasis of history, the time when, as Hegel said, Minerva’s bird takes to the air on soundless wing. The art of such criticism is to be at once contemporary and retrospective, to give an overview of the present in terms of how it is becoming the past. It is pervasive, sceptical, wry, melancholic and – a favourite ...”

“... of two and lived with a succession of relatives; at the age of five he went to boarding-school. Robert McCrum calculates that ‘in total, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15.’ After he left Dulwich College, to which he remained deeply attached for the rest of his life, his father got him a job at the Hong Kong ...”

“... Wren, came along at exactly the moment when he had fully mastered the ‘High Game’. But, as Robert Grant Irving’s fascinating study in the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture makes abundantly clear, there was far more to the making of New Delhi than the design of the buildings. His narrative is dominated by political events ...”

“... North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is ...”

“... Siberian crane dancing on the banks of the Irrawaddy River because the performance ended with the bird being shot by soldiers. Then there was the impeccable subheading to a cable from Dagestan: ‘Postscript: The Practical Uses of a Caucasus Wedding’. Not all were so light-hearted: other cables showed that many American diplomats didn’t want to be posted ...”

“... He hunted down giants for Monitor – Henry Moore, Sir Thomas Beecham, E.M. Forster, Max Ernst, Robert Graves. He had the fine, if expensive idea of filming the artist or administrator in a setting germane to his or her work. They went to Athens to profile Katina Paxinou, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to observe Rudolf Bing in the post that had been ...”

“... a novel, the diary that Lenin ought to have kept, but didn’t. For the first few weeks, the caged bird sang. Then, when I had finished Lenin’s childhood, I realised something I should have understood before I started. I could invent his comments, thoughts, feelings on any subject where these could only be guessed. But if I wanted to be taken seriously as a ...”

“... it was Charles II’s recurrent malaria that finally made its use acceptable. He was treated by Robert Talbor, a Cambridge apothecary, who, while disparaging the bark, employed a secret recipe that contained it. Charles recommended Talbor to his friend Louis XIV when the Dauphin was ill with fever. The treatment was successful, and Talbor became a pensioned ...”

“... of particular interest to anyone curious about the first British settlement of Australia, for as Robert Hughes and others have so forcefully reminded us, the closing-off of the North American market for felons after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to ...”

“... In Self-Analysis she describes Clare dreaming of her lover as a ‘large, gloriously coloured bird flying away’. Her associations included memories of a Sunday School song in which children ask Jesus to take them under his wing; her surprise at a man singling her out for his favours and his anticipating her desire for luxuries without her having to ask ...”

“... in Wiltshire. ‘He filled the place with lifesized cupids, silver and gilt candlesticks, silver bird cages, glass balls, engraved mirrors, shell pictures, crumbling Italian console tables, stone statues called Castor and Pollux and plaster casts of bits of his own anatomy.’ Then he held parties, with ‘lovely-looking people, charades, impersonations and ...”

“... he had taken Generals Dittmar, Heinrici, Seidel, Senger and Weckmann out to lunch at the Blue Bird Café in Bridgend. Liddell Hart liked to see himself in picture and print. He was ambitious, vain, self-absorbed. He was also gentlemanly, hard-working, conscientious, entertaining, kindly, hospitable. He sought higher honours than he got: a KCB at the age ...”

“... heavy pressure to do so. Metroland’s chief thruster was the railway company’s general manager, Robert Hope Selbie. His task, in Jackson’s words, was to see those unspoiled arcadias ‘comfortably populated, preferably with a high percentage of first-class season ticket-holders and their families. And if in making that possible the scenery should become ...”