“... mating call (which can be heard at http://www.bigjude.com/Page8.html) was compared by the late Douglas Adams to the opening bars of a Pink Floyd album, is unique among parrots in having a mating system in which females choose between males gathered together on a common display ground. Now that only fifty wild individuals are left in scattered locations in ...”

“... are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a better nose for phonies ...”

“... and depths and angers which were undredged, and probably unfathomable. A one-time secretary of Douglas Cleverdon (probably Stevie’s most sympathetic and certainly her most gifted BBC producer) muttered to me one day in 1958: ‘That woman is a witch.’ Stevie could disconcert people, as well as enliven and charm ...”

“... It was in May of that year that Oscar Wilde received a ‘very pathetic’ letter from Lord Alfred Douglas, of whom he had hitherto been no more than a casual acquaintance, appealing to him for help with regard to a rentboy who was threatening blackmail, and inaugurating thereby a friendship which came to fruition three years later in libel suits, bankruptcy ...”

“... to find well-preserved stone soldiers. Like Hughes, he shares an interest in war poets – Keith Douglas, for example – and refers to them approvingly in several poems. One of Longley’s favourite manoeuvres is to connect the First World War (or, say, the Trojan War) with the conflict recently ended in Northern Ireland. Several fine poems at the heart of ...”

“... contributions to the development of Azerbaijan and the entire region’. The previous day, Ilham Aliyev had seized the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning assault, expelling more than 100,000 Armenians from their homes. Azerbaijani forces have been accused of extrajudicial killings in the region.This wasn’t the first time BP had ...”

“... Group, which served the informational needs of Eurosceptic MPs, he met another recent graduate, Douglas Carswell, and convinced him to join the cause. The three young men – born in 1970 or 1971 – had certain similarities in their personal histories. Hannan and Carswell spent their childhoods in faraway, politically disturbed countries as the children of ...”

“... up. In 1912 she was sent down from the college for planning an illicit excursion to Epsom on Derby Day. Her Aunt Ada whisked her off on a tour of the Continent, evidently hoping to distract her from her liaisons dangereuses. She returned to study at the LSE, graduated in 1914, and went to work briefly for a social agency in the East End. In mid-July 1916, she ...”

“... from each of Shakespeare’s plays. This is Stratford-upon-Avon on the weekend after 23 April, a day celebrated since the 18th century as Shakespeare’s Birthday. As Park Honan’s impressive new biography reminds us, the parish records for 1564 make it certain only that he was christened on 26 April, and our knowledge of contemporary church practice ...”

“... Ark Encounter – less than an hour’s drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where ...”

“... place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in’, and which she will one day inherit, is tall, awkward, gloomy, cluttered with memories, and stuffed with heavy Victorian furniture. The only children occasionally to be found playing there are Ames’s son Robert and his friend Tobias. Glory’s consciousness permeates Home, which is ...”

“... the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every used and lost and eroded object of desire. DeLillo doesn’t always use such grave cadences, and his early novels have a lot of fun channelling the voices of half-crazed people who are themselves attempting to channel the animating spirits of ...”

“... a stunning cobalt-blue wool trapeze, with white open-backed heels and a false chignon. That very day, if memory serves, he had sent five thousand marines to Lebanon, and not a hair out of place. Dear Ike. This distinction may be a helpful one. Though Eisenhower might have been a moral coward on matters such as McCarthyism and segregation, he often expressed ...”

“... complex of military aerospace plants in the nation: Hughes, Lockheed, Northrop, TRW, McDonnell Douglas; here until a few years ago was a powerful manufacturing base with car and tire plants and, to the east in Fontana, the only integrated steel plant on the Pacific slope. Here are strange sub-cities like Vernon, a separately incorporated industrial ...”

“... But then Maitland inherited an earldom, and his lordship was evidently on the line on the first day of his neighbour’s succession with the amiable cry, ‘Good morning, Patrick.’ Having also courted Junor when he was a government minister ‘needing the occasional spot of help and understanding’, Carrington leaves the editor amazed that he should ...”