“... on ‘the grasses/Of the forest’s ferny floor’, while his knocking and smiting surprise a bird that flies up from a turret above his head; we learn that his eyes are grey, and that when he remounts to leave, the listeners hear ‘his foot upon the stirrup,/And the sound of iron on stone’.Like much of de la Mare’s best work, ‘The ...”

“... Magritte believed that some objects evoke others in non-obvious ways; rather than place the usual bird in a cage, why not a massive egg? The result is Elective Affinities (1933), a title that can stand for the series as a whole, for these pictures surprise us by way of an unexpected sympathy between things rather than an obvious disparity. By this time ...”

“... High Romantic, one moment tipping the wink to Eliot (‘The evening/Settles down like a brooding bird/Over streets that divide our life like a trauma’), the next indulging in some knock-about Elizabethan pastiche, before suddenly soaring on out-stretched wings through the Symbolist ether: The solemn symphony of angels lighting My steps with music, o ...”

“... to the textbook view that John Locke’s contractual theory of government simply demolished Robert Filmer’s efforts at assimilating the authority of kings and fathers, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government did not drive patriachal ideas out of circulation. Indeed, it was Locke who was hardly read in the early 18th century: his ideas struck no ...”

“... onto the rope with one hand, establishing a hanging belay where he roosts like a large orange bird, I untie from my anchor and clamber down the groove. It should feel like lowering into a bottomless ocean but no, all is possible, at our command. Ed’s total competence flows along the rope. His smile of steady geniality, just visible, shows through the ...”

“... of its upper works, inviting a comparison with Roman ruins that was enhanced by the flight of a bird of prey from the head-house at my approach. That sound was amplified when my foot crashed through a rotted plywood cover that had been laid over an open culvert. As I extricated myself, I reflected on my folly: had I sustained an incapacitating injury ...”

“... a cryptic strangeness and resonance which baffle any attempt to reconstruct a likely context. ‘A bird was in the room.’ ‘Mineral water – once for fun I could ... ’ ‘A lake doesn’t flow into anything, you know.’ ‘So the help goes away again without helping.’ Kafka was reduced to these scribbled messages by an illness (tuberculosis of the ...”

“... Westernisation-versus-Islamisation question through a modern device: instead of the usual cuckoo bird, two other figures had been employed, a tiny imam who appeared on the lower balcony at the proper time for prayer to announce three times that ‘God is great!’ and a minute toy gentleman wearing a tie but no moustache who showed up in the upper balcony on ...”

“... a literary enterprise organically connected to his career as poet, philosopher and historian. Like Robert Graves, he admitted that he preferred certain books – the Latin classics and the works of Augustine – to others. In fact, he went so far as to make a list of his preferences, provocatively titled ‘My favourite books: I resort to the others not as a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... white sands of the Bahamas etc), announced that he was doing the same thing all over again. Early-bird tickets for Fyre II were said to have sold out overnight, most of them presumably snapped up by people hoping to write a viral article about the clowns who would pay for such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

“... out. The clue to this movement (which is confirmed as well as threatened by the flight of the bird at the end) is the odd striking word dropped into the Ode’s second line, the word ‘hemlock’. It was, I believe, because the poet so needed this particular word for an opiate that he allowed himself to half-quote an earlier half-line of verse, ‘like ...”

“... Only after such an inventory of difference can he gather the bird into one ‘inscape’. This is an effortful thing to do– to turn an object into an authentic symbol by synthesising all its separate qualities into a single whole: it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in ...”