“... across the street from the church, in a section of the island called Sandy Ground. His name is George Hunter and he is 87 years old. One summer Saturday Mitchell takes the ferry from Manhattan to visit him. He finds Mr Hunter at home, in a tidy shingle-front house with lightning rods. A trellised rambler rose shades his screened front porch. ‘Come on ...”

“... every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’ Some of ...”

“... The narrator tells us later that before he went to France to fight he had ‘never shot at a bird or an animal in my life’ – so his first targets were humans. Sassoon’s attitude to blood sports, as to most other things, was not without its complexities. All I felt at that moment was extreme annoyance at the in-and-out running of the adult world. If ...”

“... he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different way. My friend Heather said he kept asking about me. ‘He thinks you look like a young Liv Ullmann.’ I wasn’t interested in David. He was four years younger than me and seemed immature. Since I was ...”

“... In​  The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC ...”

“... In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011) by the American writer George Prochnik shows how ideas of silence slide from literal to figurative as he roams through contemporary multi-track soundscapes made up of sirens, jingles, muzak, bleeps and ringtones, roaring restaurants and bars, police helicopters hovering menacingly over ...”

“... the eyes of God. Nowhere is this shift from margin to centre more striking than in the career of George Bernard Shaw. Born in Dublin in 1856 into a decayed branch of the Protestant Ascendancy, the son of a drunken petty official and a mother from the minor gentry, Shaw was in his own word a ‘downstart’. In this superbly perceptive study, Fintan O’Toole ...”

“... let die. Many of his poems are in praise of continuity: For continuity, A place of your own Where bird, wind passes through. The new book marks Hamburger’s 60th birthday and forty years of intermittent poetry. Many of the poems celebrate ‘natural time’s repetitions’, as in flowers, trees, a cat’s custom. For consolation, Hamburger’s muse runs to ...”

“... had descended in the dead of the night and knocked me up. (‘My mother’s a Jew, my father’s a bird,’ Buck Mulligan sings in Ulysses.)Pregnancy begins as speculation. This exhibition reminds us that for most of history – before it was possible to pee on a stick and wait for a pink line, or to see a foetus via ultrasound – doctors had no failsafe way ...”

“... White Blossom’, Leda’s swan is no match for an ‘original white, by which the ravishing bird looks wan’. The poem invokes Yeats in order to try to surpass him, but can only do this by subtraction – the swan becomes wan by losing its front letter. The image of Leda and the Swan is overcome only by an absence of image: by whiteness. Watkins is ...”

“... forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise. Stevie Smith, herself an odd bird passionately attached to a maternal aunt (though not in quite the same way), called them ‘that odd amalgam of aunt and niece’. ‘Amalgam’ nicely captures the competing elements that came to be known as a singular author, Michael Field.Bradley was born ...”

“... been a hybridising of science writers, nature journalists, writer-scientists. Diane Ackerman and George Schaller are representative of either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New Yorker, on which ...”

“... sing, and ultimately did soar and did sing, as much as his near namesake and exemplar Suibhne, the bird-bard whose story Heaney adapted in Sweeney Astray (‘I prefer the elusive/rhapsody of blackbirds/to the garrulous blather/of men and women’). Here, he was given the greatest possible distance to travel, in the form of his Northern Irish birthright: a ...”

“... thrush. Catching sight of some interesting trees at Kataoka, I wrote: While waiting For the bird to sing Shall I stand In the grove at Kataoka And feel the drops of dew? Unlike the imperial new-born, the translations in this volume are swaddled in nearly impermeable layers of editorial matter: prefaces, appendices, groundplans and some murkily ...”

“... intolerably on our nerves, nothing but an ‘Odd Bod’, as his fellow students claim, ‘a queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk’, we glimpse him through the loving eyes of his father, his one Oxford friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante Gabriel Rossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has ...”