“... Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love ...”

“... clarity of her sentences and the simplicity of their deployment. ‘The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin in a corner of a house made out of wood.’At the ...”

“... and more. She explains that she had ‘no idea what to make of’ Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ when she read it in her twenties. She then asks ‘what was the work the poem was demanding of me?’ and answers her question with ‘it was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world,’ and so she takes you there ...”

“... Or of the famous arbitrariness of the sign: ‘a “borogove” is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round – something like a live mop.’ Try working that out from the name. Compared with these astonishing jinks Joyce’s antics can look almost reasonable. In relation to ‘jabberwocky’, say, a ‘jibberweek’ seems ...”

“... had the unfortunate connotation of fetishism, as well as stigmatising their wearers as bird-brained. Similarly, high hair excited public derision and a quasi-sexual disgust. It required one to kneel, not sit, inside a carriage. It required hairdressers who stood on ladders. Indeed, hairdressers were exalted as never before. Until ...”

“... a town mouse who finds himself in deepest and darkest Dorset, looking after Marjorie, a tough old bird who drives an Alfa-Romeo and dies gamely of cancer. Greg becomes her handyman, confidant, protegé and son. Meantime he remembers his own parents who died gamely of cancer, and fights (literally, in the end) for the affections of a local farm-girl. Benson is ...”

“... called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as ...”

“... his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks Richard far too modern. Richard wins Robert’s girlfriend, Nelly Moreton, although Richard fears she is too young for him: they have much in common, Richard and Nelly, both being ...”

“... thrush. Catching sight of some interesting trees at Kataoka, I wrote: While waiting For the bird to sing Shall I stand In the grove at Kataoka And feel the drops of dew? Unlike the imperial new-born, the translations in this volume are swaddled in nearly impermeable layers of editorial matter: prefaces, appendices, groundplans and some murkily ...”

“... in her prose. One function of the novel is the commemoration and celebration of Sassoon and Owen. Robert Graves is a more equivocal spectre. The cadences of Goodbye to All That have sounded in Barker’s work before. In a climactic moment towards the end of The Century’s Daughter a social worker rescues the parrot belonging to the book’s dead heroine. He ...”

“... a poem which was ‘unsurprisingly rejected’ by Chambers; the lines ‘Now, Parrot, my sweet bird, speak out yet once again,/ Set aside all sophisms, and speak now true and plain’ seem to have some bearing on the present subject. I’m not sure that ‘rejected’ is quite the right word in this connection: but there is something more distinctly awry ...”

“... notes that many of those rivals are on the record as having killed some of their clients. Take Mrs Bird, one of Restell’s main competitors in the 1830s and 1840s, who sold ‘tonic renovating vegetable pills’, marketed euphemistically as being for ‘females in delicate health’. In 1841, Bird was discovered trying to ...”

“... Eliot touch, not even the sound of water, not even the imitation of the sound of water by a bird, for example. Relief can’t even be faked. Some would argue that Eliot never entirely threw off The Waste Land, and others that he did and to his cost, but either way it’s clear he wanted to work at getting beyond it. He had published the poem in October ...”

“... great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are ...”

“... be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its ...”