“... was the first child and eldest daughter of the future fifth earl of Leicester, later an equerry to George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the eighth earl of Hardwicke. The first chapter of Lady in Waiting, covering her ‘idyllic’ early childhood, in which the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were often brought over to play, is entitled ...”

“... his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped ...”

“... cultural history of a parish, assembled from the inside. This material is selected and analysed in George Deacon’s John Clare and the Folk Tradition, one of the most informative and valuable studies of Clare’s poetry yet to appear. The total oeuvre proves him to have been an observer of his rural habitat on the same scale as Turner, though Clare’s ...”

“... There was a Memorial Church, a Memorial Arch, a museum for Leland Jr’s bric-à-brac – jade bird, beaded necklace – and a mausoleum for his mortal remains. In 1893 an exact replica of his bedroom was installed in the museum. His father was added to the mausoleum later that year. An empty sarcophagus awaited his mother, its inscription already ...”

“... volunteer wrote, ‘but there is no possible means of wearing it without looking like a moth-eaten bird with a broken wing.’ They were each allocated five rounds of ammunition. But, as one French Communist deputy told them in farewell, ‘What you lack in weapons you will make up for in courage.’ Orwell thought this was baloney. The opinions of the other ...”

“... thing is that he goes into New York with a scrubby chin, looking perfectly foul.’ He described George Orwell (whom he met in 1944) as a ‘gentleman beachcomber’. Wodehouse’s writerly fans include some of the arch-blimps of Eng. Lit.: Hilaire Belloc called him ‘the best writer of English now alive . . . the head of my profession’; Evelyn Waugh ...”

“... group and a bronze eagle from the façade of the New Reich Chancellery replaces the far bigger bird made for Paris. Mukhina’s group, as one of the catalogue essays points out, must owe its basic conception (two figures striding forward in unison) to the antique statues of the tyrant killers made by Critios and Nesiote in 477-476 BC – just the sort of ...”

“... politicised his favourite mode with the onset of the Civil War – attacking his former friend George Wither for joining the Parliamentarians, for example, with the couplet ‘For Nonsence is Rebellion, and thy writing/Is nothing but Rebellious Warres inciting’ – Malcolm is so vehemently opposed to the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom nonsense ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of hours in the sun eating candy and talking.’ Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a lively, sociable couple. The fourth member of the party on that bucolic outing was ...”

“... others shouting, while one demented wretch shrieked at short and regular intervals like a tropical bird. Almost worse was a big dull-eyed woman who sat bolt upright in her bed, oblivious to the surrounding tumult, as silent and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of ...”

“... yellow breasts, which seem to be nesting in the creeper rather than by the beck, which is what the bird book says they should be doing. Chrissie opposite says she has a couple of yellow wagtails in her garden, but she is much nearer the water. Not sure how common grey wagtails are, I knock on Timmy Hutchinson (Timmy the Twitcher)’s door to tell him so that ...”

“... attractive work’, Milton gives thanks to God chiefly for three reasons. The first, in George Burnett’s 1809 translation, is that I was born in those times of my country, when the effulgent virtue of its citizens – when their magnanimity and steadiness, surpassing the highest praise of their ancestors, under the inspection of God first ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.’ 30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother ...”

“... thousand distinguished fashionables’. On 12 April, she was received at Carlton Palace by King George IV, who, it was reported, ‘expressed great pleasure at her appearance’. So many people came to see Crachami that she was soon exhausted. In fact, she may have died of exhaustion, though it was more probably TB. On Thursday, 3 June, she received more ...”