“... It is not its only crisis. British books on the subject fail singularly to discuss the ‘iron cage of bondage’ which the social state has created: that is to say, the process of bureaucratisation which has de-personalised the most personal service of the modern state. Few functions of the modern state are more miserably associated with ...”

“... his career as a naturalist: his father, and his scientific mentor, the Cambridge professor John Henslow. While Desmond and Moore’s style was colourful, punchy and occasionally melodramatic, liberally embellished with exclamation marks, the tone of Browne’s writing, though no less vivid, is often lightly ironic. She has Darwin showing off to Henslow ...”

“... other than any other people I know are about their colleagues,’ Sarah observes in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), Drabble’s first novel. ‘I hate anyone to be didactic except me.’ ‘Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.’In comparison with lines like these, Byatt sometimes seems to ...”

“... fish guts. But rather than a beautiful youth, the earl is a ‘foetal ape’ imprisoned in a cage, who repeatedly rapes his centuries-old housekeeper. After Many a Summer both suffers and benefits from the unresolved tension between the demands of satire and mysticism. The novel reuses the ‘country house’ form that allowed Huxley, in early novels ...”

“... fashion outlets (usually chimerical).Brown does not look far beyond the lifers in their pinchbeck cage and the sordid galère of dependent hangers-on staring through the bars: secular confessors, commentators, scriptwriters, ‘insiders’, ‘historians’, informal advisers, scum-of-the-earth journalists whose expertise is in stalking and having ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... tentatively down over his stomach, then pressed my hand into the hollow beneath his right rib-cage while he breathed deeply in and out. His liver didn’t feel any larger or more tender than when I’d last examined him a couple of weeks earlier. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked, holding my gaze. He had been straining to keep things light, as if we ...”

“... is one of freedom, freedom from ideology (class interests have not yet come down like an iron cage), the freedom of discovery – sexuality, culture, ideas – and in a more subtle sense, perhaps, the freedom from nationality, from the guilt of class and of being an American. What the ‘real’ writer wants to write about is not that kind of ...”

“... an impenetrable accent, he decides to buy ‘a little Filipino servant instead’. There was no cage Waugh would not rattle. Sometimes it was just for fun. He could be, as his former colleague Max Hastings put it, ‘manically mischievous’. At others he would make a point with Swiftian savagery, as in July 1977 when the Gay News trial came to court. Mary ...”

“... Court for Art), 1993-96, annotated with applied subaltern theory, ‘an art standard is a cage for art.’ News that the Guggenheim in New York, the arbiter of the modern, would mount an exhibition to cover five thousand years of Chinese art up to the present was received as a long-awaited vindication. This project, drawing on collections from all ...”

“... supremacy where it belonged, with the ‘richer classes’. In an age which saw Ruskin calling John Stuart Mill a ‘loathsome cretin’ we needn’t be surprised that Harrison was also capable of strong language. When Joseph Chamberlain was said to have hurt his ankle in 1906, Harrison prayed ‘for the sake of our poor dear country’ that the trouble ...”

“... Clock (2016), Riskin mentions a 16th-century devil carved from wood that appeared to burst from a cage: ‘horrible, twisted, horned, rolling furious eyes, sticking out a blood-red tongue, [it seemed] to throw itself upon the spectator, spitting in his face and letting out great howls.’ Inside was a set of hidden bellows powered by a suspended weight: the ...”

“... and crash-lands in Trafalgar Square. His encounter with English society as he lies captive in his cage and waits for his wings to grow back is an occasion for Satyanarayana to comment wryly on many things: among them, cultural difference, the nature of scientific progress, and the resources that Indian culture may still possess even though under colonial ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”