“... 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 ...”

“... before, that he had sucked up to Williams in a queenly manner and that, in the opinion of ‘The Bird’ (Vidal’s usual term for Tennessee’s person of plumage and flutter), he was an old gentleman ‘with urinestained flies’. Thus the newer version is more instructive and nearer to the nitty, if not indeed the actual gritty. In a letter to Jack Kerouac ...”

“... different periods of time. Each poem in Clavics looks like a key constructed from shape poems by George Herbert: the blade of the key is a double-decker version of Herbert’s ‘The Altar’, while the handle has the bird-shaped narrow waist of ‘Easter Wings’: ‘I am good for nothing/Else these days than making of ...”

“... the voice of young Laura: ‘birds’-nesting was a cruel sport … “Oh dear! What must the poor bird have felt” was Laura’s cry. But the boys only laughed and pushed her aside.’ In the later books she scorns her youthful sentiments; her retrospective admiration for, even defence of, the toughness and staunch inflexibility of rural life, the ...”

“... intrigued her, even if at first she told her friend Eleanor Roosevelt that he was an ‘odd bird’ and she was more interested in a nameless but decorative Swedish ‘bum’. Spain was the place to be, she said later, the place where a titanic confrontation was being played out at ‘one of those moments in history when there was no ...”

“... he didn’t object to being teased about his ‘humble origins’ by the Hollywood director George Cukor, who to rub it in once sent a green Rolls-Royce to chauffeur him along Sunset Boulevard to Cukor’s house. The two became friends while working on an ill-fated film (later described as one of ‘the most expensive flops in movie history’) called ...”

“... Wildean epigrams with boarding-school japery, plus comments on various contemporaries, such as George Orwell (‘a very queer bird’) or Stephen Spender (‘he seems to like himself as a chairman, and indeed as a public speaker altogether’) or his hosts at University College in Bangor (‘The Moses Williams’s are ...”

“... cheekbone and glittering, oddly skewed eyes, A.B. Craig bore a disconcerting resemblance to the bird of prey that punningly adorned the school coat of arms. Along with his twin brother, whose name we could see high up on the roll of honour, Craig had fought at the Somme: according to school legend a shell had landed on their platoon, killing his twin and ...”

“... by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, to prevent George Galloway from publishing photographs of him on the internet. But those who are keen to see privacy protected by law were making a mistake if they cheered or jeered at the court’s refusal to protect Mahmood from the kind of exposure to which his paper ...”

“... his own brand of Southern Gothic: ‘Now there are a great many dogs in this town, rat terriers, bird dogs, bloodhounds; they trail along the forlorn noon-hot streets in sleepy herds of six to a dozen, all waiting only for dark and the moon, when straight through the lonesome hours you can hear them howling: someone is dying, someone is dead.’ Many of the ...”

“... or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in the ...”

“... words to stand out when they appear in the third stanza. A ‘Shroud’ – one of the ‘bird-like’ comforters – lets something fall: it might be a sword, or it might even be a curse or a promise or a prophecy. Instead, it is a bundle of linen, something harmless and domestic. The weak trochaic sound ‘linen’ is soon followed by the stronger ...”

“... helpless, turned on its back, legs pedalling. Anna was delighted: one rodent fewer to poison. The bird flew up to the shed roof, the better to enjoy its morsel. A passing squirrel startled it. The dying or dead mouse fell from its grip and rolled down the mildewed slope. London anticipates disaster. And, in that fearful anticipation, incubates it. Visible ...”

“... wind-honed archipelago. Many of them are inhabited. The islands are whale-shapes, as their poet George Mackay Brown noted. Few trees impede the wind. Water, salt and fresh, in wide bays or lochs or channels, is always to hand, lightening and softening the land it encircles. The land is fertile, the people prosperous, Norse, liberal, and they live in two ...”

“... and the counter-revolution exist not only in the world at large but also within himself. As George Orwell really did say in another context, it would almost be worth being dead to have something like that written about you. And in The Great Melody, O’Brien expanded upon some of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have ...”