“... 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 ...”

“... had a bad reaction to the silver make-up and nearly died, and that the film was transformed by George Cukor, who came on set for a week after Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired and before Victor Fleming took over. Cukor changed the bricks of the Yellow Brick Road from oval to rectangular and gave the Wicked Witch a bun to make her look ...”

“... fell out my wife and I’ the other night: she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into King Lear; presently it was discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of the truth, and we tenderly carried off each other’s ...”

“... they became ‘short timers’, considered the unluckiest stage, before boarding the Freedom Bird for The World and home. Charlie, in contrast, was in for the duration. That same afternoon I booked at the military section of Tan Son Nhut airport, Aerial Port Nine, for the ominously named War Zone C, where Attleboro, the war’s biggest operation to ...”

“... between the banks and the car industry is like watching two mangy cats fighting over a dead bird: portions of the British car industry have been taken under government control before now – British Leyland was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 ...”

“... he shows the Major the grounds, and after punishing a spaniel for killing a chicken by tying the bird round its neck, indicates a diamond-shaped bed of lavender: ‘“Planted by my dear wife.” After a moment, as if to clear up a possible misunderstanding, he added: “Before she died.”’ That evening, the Major looks out from the cat-filled bar and ...”

“... its emblem of the English countryside, surely this is it again, the ‘delicate grotesque silver bird’ on the De Morgan tile scavenged by the children from the mud in Offshore. The Pre-Raphaelite interest was profoundly, though obliquely, autobiographical. Fitzgerald had known Burne-Jones’s window in Birmingham Cathedral since she was tiny – it was ...”

“... by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ...”

“... and English translation, ‘the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy’, Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac and ‘any unflinching book on the World War’ – suggests that Salinger, whose forty-year silence followed its appearance, may have reached the same conclusion. But maybe not. Salinger’s enthusiasm for ...”

“... and she had a perfect mania for going to church.’ A few pages later she is described as ‘a bird of paradise that had been left out all night in the rain’. Constance probably didn’t know that her husband’s description of Sybil Vane in the novel has echoes in a letter to Lillie Langtry, unless it was the sort of thing he went around saying. ‘I am ...”

“... throw soft light on the poems. In ‘Poem’ she described a painting done by her great-uncle George, and suddenly realised that she knew the place he painted, she too had been there. ‘Heavens, I recognise the place, I know it!’ the poem reads. It is risky to use a word like ‘heavens’, especially if the poet is worried about being precious. The ...”

“... your great-grandfather that is, faced the Luddites … Oh my poor little parrot, fowl or bird, you have much to learn.’The narrative structure of A Legacy is tricky. Timescales jump around a bit, as does the dialogue, and the point of view, supposedly that of the little daughter, does what Bedford herself called ‘a Cheshire cat’, disappearing ...”

“... who were purged by Johnson. No supposedly dictatorial previous prime minister, not Lloyd George, not Churchill, certainly not Thatcher, came anywhere close to this Stalinist ruthlessness.As we are now seeing, any centralisation of power tends also to centralise corruption. The lobbyists gather like flies or vultures round Number Ten, because no other ...”

“... in company with his most distinguished European and American admirers (James, Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Howells, the authorities in Oxford who gave him an honorary doctorate in 1879), read him largely in French or English. His importance for Western literature is unavoidably a mediated one, and it is through translation that we see what made those ...”

“... issue, an act of misreading. In truth, of course, Auden was innately as much of a moralist as George Eliot, and if he was drawn to the dream of poetry as pure play, then his ambitions were hopelessly compromised, like the Falstaff he described in a dazzling essay in The Dyer’s Hand (1962) – a collection of poet’s prose only rivalled in the 20th ...”