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“... great modernists of the postwar era: Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, George Benjamin. But Messiaen had no interest in moulding acolytes. He urged his students to follow their intuitions and – in the case of foreign-born pupils – their native traditions. ‘You have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and ...”

“... envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the ...”

“... meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental utopian to be disappointed. In domestic affairs, Obama’s obeisance to the Washington consensus led him to abandon the bold approach he ...”

“... for mostly have to do with his difficulties getting published: ‘My play in French,’ he tells George Reavey of Eleutheria, ‘was almost taken by Hussenot-Grenier,’ while ‘Watt was “nearly” taken in London, I forget by whom’ (a footnote informs us that Herbert Read at Routledge read the novel with ‘considerable bewilderment’ and found it ...”

“... in a providential state of natural goodness (and possessed untrammelled innocence). Carroll met George MacDonald in Eastbourne in 1854, at the speech therapist’s where he tried to cure his stammer; structural and thematic coincidences abound between Phantasties and the Alice books, as the MacDonald scholar John Docherty has patiently analysed, and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... specimens in the Rio Negro for the Paris Muséum. Still, his haul was tremendous: rock samples, bird skins, pickled flatworms, ground sloth fossils (bought from a gaucho for two shillings). ‘His companions on the Beagle,’ writes Ronald Clark, ‘soon ceased to wonder at the young man who caught 68 species of beetle in a single day and shot 80 species of ...”

“... the narrator on a tour of Wandsworth, Clapham and Brixton in his Austin van. In the film, Barny (George Sewell) talks over his shoulder to (or at) an unidentified invisible presence in the back of the van. ‘Once you get your foot in the door,’ he swaggers, ‘you’ve got to keep it there.’ This exposition of method soon acquires a nastier tone. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recur in Barker’s fiction), a pacifist now imprisoned for an improbable plot to poison Lloyd George with curare. Her cell is under unremitting surveillance, and the spyhole in the door is surrounded by an elaborately painted eye. Increasingly convinced that she has been clumsily framed by the Intelligence Unit that employs him, Prior’s loyalties are ...”

“... the spiritual and religious concerns of The Aerodrome, hinted at by the epigraph, a verse of George Herbert’s about sin and love. Rex Warner was a Classical scholar, and his prose – carved, marble-hard, balanced – reads like a very good translation of Classical Latin. The story he tells, with children’s discovery of lost parents and of parental ...”

“... Technology and bureaucracy are, of course, finally defeated. Marcom disappears, like the fabled bird, up one of its own Slow Time cabins. A heroic band escapes to the real world outside. On April Fool’s day, the BBC ran a spoof news story, in which it was alleged that Brussels had issued strict regulations as to the tread legally required on Community ...”

“... to have love affairs and yet not to be sentimental. It gave me a feeling of very pedantic wit and bird-like morals.’ Benson was content to be a sexless Ariel, separating platonism from passion, love from taint, hoping at best to frolic, an aging walrus with a playful kitten, and sadly recording in 1913 that he had never kissed. Occasionally he vaguely ...”

“... or those who walk for the sake of the experience. Wordsworth and Coleridge did this, and so did George Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath ...”

“... since March,’ Brit Bennett said of her new novel. The Vanishing Half came out a week after George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black ...”