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“... was 5'4" and weighed 100 lbs: vital statistics for a man who had always wanted to be a bird. Growing up on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil, he had watched eagles ‘flying so high and soaring on their great outstretched wings’, and had fallen in love with the ideals of ‘space and freedom’. In 1891, the family moved to Paris. When ...”

“... it had settled into. Coleman loved Charlie Parker’s music – he wrote a tune called ‘Bird Food’3 and could mimic Parker brilliantly – but, as he put it in the liner notes to Change of the Century, he felt that ‘the idolisation of Bird … has finally come to be an impediment to progress in jazz.’The ...”

“... Beast of the Earth appears – a monster with feet like a camel, the head of an ox, the wings of a bird, the ears of an elephant and the tail of a ram – and a battle takes place between the Dajjal (Antichrist) and Isa (Jesus), whose gaze melts the Dajjal ‘like salt in water’. This is before the dead are brought back to life in advance of the final ...”

“... alongside the human word: Hypnos (Sleep) hides in the branches of a pine, looking like the bird which the gods call chalkis and men call kymindis (Iliad, 14, 291). The gods’ word must be the right word (compare W.P. Ker’s reply to one who said, ‘It’s not my idea of a magpie’: ‘It’s God Almighty’s idea of a magpie’). There is something ...”

“... emphasis is identified with the 19th-century novel, which ‘at its pinnacle was a Judaised novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.’ Ozick argues that the aesthetic world view is the opposite of the ...”

“... sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood (I think) and to Wilkie Collins. The effect is like an unseen examination for Joint Honours in English Art and Literature, except that while Ackroyd trusts the ‘scholarly reader’ to recognise the literary gobbets, he ...”

“... Big guns (J. B. Priestley, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Angus Wilson) have been booming the name of John Cowper Powys for many years, outraged that other big guns will not join the salute. In the first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above John Cowper, thus denying J ...”

“... our own Royal Family is concerned: I seem to remember him citing as a fine example of a royal joke George V’s habitual greeting to Chula when he went to luncheon at Buckingham Palace: ‘How’s your uncle Damrong? I always tell him he’ll never be any good until he’s damn right.’ He has some curious and disturbing accomplishments. On the rare occasions ...”

“... boys were grown up, he got lonely; simple as that.’ At other times P.G. Wodehouse takes over. George Mitchell is ‘an immensely shrewd and capable wise oldish bird’; Bill Clinton was ‘a total brick throughout’; Derry Irvine ‘has a brain the size of a melon’. People are ‘of that ilk’ and can be found with ...”

“... short stories he’d started writing: one was called ‘The Clang Birds’, ‘about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass. In Wallace’s story,’ Max writes, ‘God ran an existential game show where contestants were asked impossible or paradoxical questions. God wielded the buzzer and no one could stop ...”

“... by exporting an elderly English widow as a minor Hindu deity. Of the poets here, Philip Gross and George Szirtes follow Conrad’s route. Fleur Adcock, re-importing a wicked Englishness from the Antipodes, favours Mrs Moore. The others work variations on Forster, with the occasional Conradian divertissement. The son of ‘a Displaced Person from ...”

“... of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916. A lion got his brother George, who was hunting in British East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s ...”

“... her behaviour very offensive: I found it funny and typical and just about right for a tough little bird out of Damon Runyon. She went at her Cobb salad like a demon. She had little gold earrings made like shirt buttons, and they glinted in tune with her eyes, which slid from side to side while these ‘European intellectuals’ talked about wine. The film ...”

“... and crowning the city was the church of Sacré-Coeur, very white, standing like some dry Byzantine bird, to my mind hollow-eyed and without conscience, presiding over the habits of the flesh and – to judge by what I read in newspapers – its crime also; its murders, rapes, its shootings for jealousy and robbery. As my French improved, the secrets of Paris ...”

“... Lincolnshire Poacher’, one of the best-known English folk songs (and a favourite of George IV’s), gives voice to a familiar figure, a canny, twinkly-eyed dissident who strikes out by moonlight for illicit game. ‘’Tis my delight on a shiny night,’ he boasts in the chorus, ‘in the season of the year.’ Since at least the late 19th ...”