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“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... tweed cap and a lilac chiffon scarf, allowed me to sit in his studio while he painted a flying bird.’ That self-conscious reduction to a few dazzling elements is typical of Chatwin’s affectation, and it was certainly a mannerism in the books, but only a fool or a hostile witness – Craig Raine appears to be one or the other – would preen himself for ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked ...”

“... of ‘places’ to visit in her mind. First up is the garden at the Haworth parsonage:The mute bird sitting on the stone,The dank moss dripping from the wall,The garden-walk with weeds o’ergrownI love them – how I love them all!These lines prospect methodically, inching forward through parallelism and internal rhyme until they have identified the exact ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... the mill, devious bard, thief of nature, false traitor, devil’s progeny, tallow filling, gallows bird, give up, you’re defeated!) This multiplicity of voices does owe something to Chaucer, the arch-ventriloquist of the Canterbury Tales, but Dunbar prefers to stick with one voice, or a small number of voices, in relatively short poems rather than embark on ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... of them, or that Sisyphus had been mysteriously involved with Odysseus’ mother, that the first bird to abduct Ganymede was not an eagle but a swan, or that beloved Iolaus was also popular in Etruria, under the name of Vile. By the same measure, some of the myths we had come to see as central and important – the ‘invention’ of sacrifice, the theft of ...”

“... encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... critic is nagging) what about all those bits where an experience – airport mishap, roadside bird or gum-blossom – is put on record merely because it’s her experience? What about the gratuitous scathing of her mother and the lazy library assistants, people who can’t answer back? Why did the suite in the hotel in Delhi, from which she watched the ...”

“... Damn your cold breath down your gullet To the stone under your left breast To the cut-throat bird in that stone To the crow of crows the nest of emptiness The hungry shears of beginning and beginning To heaven’s womb don’t I know it Damn your seed and sap and shine And dark and stop at the end of my life And everything in the world The ...”