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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to quit was Ismaïl Cem, the Foreign Minister, a respected intellectual whose warm relations with George Papandreou, his Greek counterpart, led to the remarkable rapprochement between the two Aegean neighbours. Cem was quickly followed by Kemal Dervis, the guarantor of Turkey’s international credit line. In the confusion following their ...”

“... has become so familiar, at least in the States, that it’s approaching the folkloric status of George Washington and the cherry tree. The brilliant Kenyan father meeting the mother at the University of Hawaii, where her father had moved for a job; Obama Senior going off to Harvard to take his doctorate and then continuing back to Kenya, leaving Barack and ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”