“... 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 means good. ‘We would rather have “Fra Lippo Lippi” than an essay on Realism in Art,’ George Eliot said in her warm and insightful review of Men and Women, the collection in which the poem was published, without question Browning’s masterpiece. She singled out for similar admiration a passage from another poem in the book, ‘How It Strikes a ...”

“... having read it, and all the other reviews as well:Reviewing Martin Amis is like trying to hear a bird sing in the midst of an artillery duel. ‘Most powerful, wonderful, titanic English novelist alive’ boom the guns of one side. ‘Talentless, jumped-up, nepotistic little nobody’ comes the answering fire.What is Mr Ableman to think? ‘The long-term ...”

“... others (see Dick Cheney). But it only happens when the president decides to let it happen (see George W. Bush). No one can bring power to the office by their own efforts. Johnson tried in the early days, throwing his weight around in the Democratic caucus in the Senate as though nothing had changed. He was politely, and then less politely, ignored. He ...”

“... to be grossly exploited when you can buy a small British chicken in Aldi for £1.87 and a medium bird for £3. The president of the British Veterinary Association and the head of food policy at Which? continue to insist that chlorine-washing chickens does mask dodgy animal husbandry and that rates of foodborne disease are far higher in the US.Nor are things ...”

“... with a sprinkling of other Catholics. Making his way on personal magnetism, ‘he could charm a bird out of a tree’, a friend recalled. For years he had been attracted to Rose Fitzgerald, according to Nasaw ‘the most famous and surely one of the prettiest Catholic girls in the city’, though even the loyal Perry admits that ‘her Boston accent, and ...”

“... much given to personal revelation, but the essentials are there. In a folio on the aerodynamics of bird-flight, squeezed unceremoniously into a corner, we find the famous note about his ‘first memory’ (or, as Freud preferred, fantasy): ‘It seemed to me, when I was in my cradle, that a kite came to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me ...”

“... heard the news of the President’s assassination, ‘without a pause she said: "My God, Lady Bird in the White House. We can’t use her in the magazine!"’ Vreeland was almost 60 when she became editor of Vogue in 1962; she could easily have spent the next ten years foisting her snobbery and general foolishness in full colour on the American public ...”

“... of a ‘new company of courtly makers’. They had, the Elizabethan literary historian George Puttenham wrote, ‘travailed into Italie, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesie’, and so ‘greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie’. Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling James himself, gives the benefit of his experience to a young writer, Paul Overt. St George, we are given to understand, has ‘sold out’, and in order to make money ...”

“... Most readers’ first entry into this claustrophobic world is by way of Hangover Square, in which George Harvey Bone moons after Netta Longdon, an attractive yet incredibly unpleasant would-be actress. In addition to exploiting Bone’s small private income and tenuous showbiz connections, Netta unconsciously lusts after Hitler and occasionally goes to bed ...”

“... The tide of modern art wasn’t long in coming: in the first Impressionist salon in 1874, George Braquemond showed an etching of Manet’s Olympia alongside an intriguing version of Rain, Steam and Speed. He captured some of the elements of Turner’s title – the wind-driven rain slashes across the bridge – but his train appears as static as a ...”

“... range of the tourists. Boswell and Gibbon stayed, as did the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, George Romney and Joseph Wright of Derby. Travellers who meet their fellow countrymen and women abroad often strike up friendships they would be unlikely to form at home and the Hadfields made connections to which no innkeeper’s family in England could ...”

“... of the cause was to increase the human quotient of happiness for which man was created ‘as a bird for flight’. ‘I have the accursed desire to be happy, and would be ready, day after day, to haggle for my little portion of happiness with the foolish obstinacy of a pigeon.’ Again these are not quite metaphors: ‘Sometimes, it seems to me,’ she ...”