“... 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 ...”

“... Iraq, who built a boat to preserve his family and the birds and beasts he took on board. The first bird released after six days of floods ‘flew to and fro but found no resting place’. The similarity between this text and the narrative of the Flood in Genesis caused a sensation after the tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh in northern Iraq in ...”

“... Wear. Her body was found the next morning in the derelict Old Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across ...”

“... with language which produces felicities such as: ‘Not a blade of grass moved and not a bird flew down the perspective of the great water, but, under thickety trees, officers and children skated with coloured cloaks and gloves over a pond. Beyond, dazzling and enchanted, lay the leafless forest.’ Very finely crafted, too, though this love-affair ...”

“... he suffered. He was surprised by the islands of Lombock and Bali where Australian and Asian bird faunas were insulated from each other by a strait only ten miles wide. The central isle of the Malay archipelago, Celebes, surprised him again, for instead of finding inhabitants typifying the richness of the whole archipelago, he found it parsimonious of ...”

“... Water, which was set in the Caribbean and starred Michael Caine. O’Brien’s partner was George Harrison, who didn’t like the pig film either, and it’s evidence of Michael Palin’s generosity that he remained on good terms with the pair of them. At one point in the book my spirits rise when I read: ‘Denis is in a very bad way.’ Alas it turns ...”

“... This is dangerous territory, but it will be clear to anyone who has read Franzen’s essay ‘My Bird Problem’ in The Discomfort Zone that Walter’s agony about songbirds is shared, passionately, by his author. However, when Walter rages against the fragmentation of bird habitat to Richard, this is Richard’s ...”

“... after eight my little Waldo ended his life.’ He gave up ‘his little innocent breath like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous hymns to nature or self-reliance seem less vital than the radical provocations of his friends Whitman and Thoreau. Yet there is nothing sepia about the words he scratched into his journal ...”

“... In a certain sense, I have never exactly ‘made’ a story. With me the process is much more like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of these pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up. If you were very lucky (I have ...”

“... had gone wide of the mark and crashed through the animal’s eye. As it thrashed around in agony, George had just stood there, quivering and numb. It was left to Dorothy to fetch a clamp, secure the bloody, squealing creature by the nostrils and knock it dead with one almighty swing of the hammer. ‘Men!’ she had muttered, in a scornful tone of voice, and ...”

“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who ...”

“... politics are condemned by Plumb as a chaotic and expensive drag on social progress – by the time George IV died, the system was wholly rotten. Clark’s vision of the end of the Ancien Régime is a tragic one. 1829 (a more crucial date than 1832) marks the death of the confessional state: with Catholic Emancipation and the beginnings of Parliamentary ...”

“... extraordinary success was interpreted as an anomaly. She styled herself as a Romantic genius like George Sand, to whom she was constantly compared, and seemed to transcend the constraints of her sex.‘Women’s rights! – women’s nonsense!’ she complained in the 1850s. ‘Women should seek to establish their rights by good and great works, and not by ...”