“... composer of the Blue Danube Waltz owned a number of sea-birds. One day he left the door of their cage open. The birds followed democratic procedure in deciding whether they should escape. Only a small number voted approval.’ Which episode reduces to the words and to the promised homophone, ‘Les trois mouettes de Strauss: pour’. These are up-market ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... In her speech accepting the Premio Galileo Galilei, which opens the second volume, she credited John Florio, a brilliant promoter of Italian learning in 16th-century London, with introducing her not only to Giordano Bruno but also to ‘members of the Warburg Institute, then newly arrived in London with their wonderful library’. In her dealings with past ...”

“... will my flailing material assume?’ Carter, one gathers, felt the opposite to Welty. She told John Haffenden, in 1984, that in The Passion of New Eve, she created Tristessa, the transvestite movie star, ‘in order to say some quite specific things about the cultural production of femininity’. Her training in medieval literature had given her a liking ...”

“... possibilities of language and the eccentric image, invoking ‘My nine-tiered tigress in the cage of sex’, asking: Who at the kiss, who has not seen, over The waterfalling hair at the shoulder of Life, Death from his own face staring out of a glass. He moves often between ecstasy and absurdity: What when borne upward breaking from heaven downward It ...”

“... the only restrained beasts. Tam and Richie are always being ‘herded’ in and out of buildings; John Hall compares them to roaming wildebeest, and tells his brother to ‘take them to the pens ... That’s the best place for them.’ The Holocaust parallels, too, are laid on pretty thick. Donald describes the ‘permanent electric high-tensile fence’ as ...”

“... and dirt, piles it on), who is holding out his own toy for the other boy to see. He is shaking the cage, baiting its inmate – ‘a live rat!’ The poem ends: ‘And the two children laughed at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...”

“... who gave her a golf-ball typewriter to write her next play, proclaimed her to be as ‘fresh’ as John Osborne and (not a very high bar) more ‘mature’. Vituperation wasn’t going to knock out her popularity but praise tended to box in her reputation. She was a visionary who was often treated as if she were a reporter. The Los Angeles Times obituary ...”

“... landed in a single lump, and that was where they built Enscombe!’ Worse, as the late Reverend Cage’s History of the parish helpfully opines, Enscombe is a typical Hampshire name, not at all a Yorkshire one: the etymology may be from Enna’s Combe, ‘suggesting a connection with the Sicilian vale where Proserpine, gathering flowers, herself a fairer ...”

“... seemed to him even more hopeless than his own. Killing them seemed like letting a bird out of a cage. But he stops short of claiming he killed out of pity; he killed them, he says, because ‘I could only relate to a dead image of the person I could love ... The sight of them brought me a bitter sweetness and a temporary peace and fulfilment.’ He wore his ...”

“... with which Bate invites us to grieve over Hughes’s death: ‘The jaguar was at rest in his cage.’ Particularly significant pronouncements or developments are delivered breathlessly, as so often in biographies that pander to a hunger for the sensational, in sentences that lack a main verb: ‘Then a row, an explosion of anger. Sylvia, a trapped ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”