“... 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 ...”

“... recent critical work, Writing and the Body. (Particularly relevant is the fourth chapter, ‘A bird was in the room’.) The novel’s framing situation is the regular visit paid by a niece to her bedridden aunt. Their exchanges, reproduced with Sterneian dashes rather than inverted commas, are largely banal, as are the other conversations which the old ...”

“... Civil War and seeded Civil Rights’. Brown was recently the subject of a TV series, The Good Lord Bird, starring Ethan Hawke. Brands writes that his students in Austin, Texas, ‘can’t get enough of John Brown’.Lincoln and Brown both hated slavery but that conviction by itself did not tell a person how to take action against it. When the Fugitive Slave ...”

“... him/bristling/rising/up’. Clifton found common ground with Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969): ‘She was mute for a couple of years. And I think that the way you try to deal with not being able to talk about it is to write.’ The girl’s attempt to ‘build something human’ from her suffering involves the recognition that her ...”

“... back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling conflicting stories of exactly what had ...”

“... to get to the bottom of this phenomenon in his lively first collection, The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird. The pale, red-haired beauty of his ‘Ur-Aisling’ is so thoroughly archetypal that she appears ‘when the world had not yet happened’ and invites the poet to create ‘a nation’: So I thought ‘Fine!’ and did the lot. First I laid mythologies ...”

“... the deepest parts of the self. ‘Do you know what gives me no peace nowadays?’ she wrote to Robert Seidel in 1898: the fact that people, ‘when they are writing, forget for the most part to go deeper inside themselves’. ‘I hereby vow,’ she continued, ‘never to forget when I am writing … to go inside myself.’ She was talking about the ...”

“... I dwell,’ and you see why the line disgusted a generation that valued irony and understatement. Robert Lowell told Spender that the line should be ‘I would think continually of those who are truly great’ because, as he patiently explained, ‘one cannot think of the great all the time, though one may wish to do so’; but the line, with its illogic and ...”

“... repulsive, and dressed in an outlandish way. The poet Jean Tortel remembered her as ‘a kind of bird without a body, withdrawn, in a huge black cloak which she never took off and which flapped around her calves’. Weil never defined herself as a woman, any more than as a Jew.She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1931, during the brief prewar ...”

“... meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he frequented, where she would be told to wait in the ...”

“... sore annoyèd, groping in that griesly night. (These avian warnings derive ultimately from the bird auguries of ancient myth.) Raban hears later that the vultures that followed him ‘never cross the state line. They’ll fly out to mid-channel, and the moment they touch Iowa, they’ll turn back.’ As Faust and the Inferno testify, even the most powerful ...”

“... a Mrs Bennet or an Emma, Sophia Ainger the vicar’s wife does her best to manoeuvre Rupert Stone-bird into the arms of sister Penelope. Her expedients include a dinner party at the vicarage, the Christmas bazaar, an excursion to Rome after Easter for the parish stalwarts. Stonebird proves as impervious as his name, or rather begins to develop instead a ...”

“... and concerns of the near-nonsensical Cave of Spleen episode in The Rape of the Lock. The fact that Robert Southey wrote enthusiastically about Taylor in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831) doesn’t do much to establish the Water-Poet as an unacknowledged influence either; although he does briefly quote from Sir Gregory Nonsence, Southey is ...”

“... Snow Man’, my favourite painting Pieter Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap. The film scene that ran on a neverending loop in my head was the snowy automobile and sleigh ride in The Magnificent Ambersons; my perfect exit from this world – at 19 one plans such things – was Gerald’s long walk into the Alpine blizzard ...”

“... Motherwell), Cage was well placed to soak up ideas. He played chess with Duchamp, and befriended Robert Rauschenberg, whose notorious White Paintings – a series of rectangular canvasses painted plain white – have often been seen as the visual counterpart to 4’33”. Cage recognised that the ‘emptiness’ of Rauschenberg’s paintings was no such ...”