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“... Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such words as gridlock (“urban traffic jam”). ’ So proclaimed the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. British and American English do indeed differ in all sorts of ways, as the following list of equivalent pairs will remind any doubters: lift/elevator, push-chair/stroller, bonnet/hood, boot/trunk, windscreen/windshield ...”

“... delight he became World Champion in Spain in 1952. The following year he published On Being a Bird, which quickly established itself as the most beautiful gliding book ever written: for Wills could not only draw on the experiences of an astonishing twenty years which took gliding, and him with it, from a broomstick-and-bungey affair at the Wasserkuppe and ...”

“... Robert Lowell is not difficult to represent as the mad poet and justified sinner of the Romantic heritage. He is the dual personality who breaks the rules, kicks over the traces: he did this in the course of a series of manic highs which came and went from maturity, if not before, until the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60 ...”

“... or psychoanalyst’s. In ‘The Problem of Anxiety’, one of the clearer poems in Can You Hear, Bird, Ashbery, with his Waspish reticence, asks the reader (perhaps the psychoanalyst part of himself) how he would represent himself given the opportunity: Suppose this poem were about you, would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of ...”

“... there any straight ones in Flaxborough?), a thoroughly repulsive doctor and his teenage dolly-bird, and a rabbit-faced crook of well-tried incompetence – all good Flaxborough figures. If Colin Watson enjoys abundant affection from crime-readers but not quite the esteem that Mesdames Rendall and James reap, it may be because his solutions are sometimes ...”

“... of a pair of super-imposed isorhythmic sequences on piano and cello decorated with snatches of bird-song: the violin does a nightingale, the clarinet a blackbird. The movement does not develop in any way; the isorhythmic sequences continue for a time, the birds chatter and gurgle. Then it stops. It is as if one had been shown a sample of acoustic eternity ...”

“... slashes of its vast folded wings. Diomedea exulans, the wandering albatross, was an improbable bird, seemingly assembled from the disparate parts of others: a dodo here, a seagull there, a wingspan from something prehistoric. You didn’t need to know what it was, or to be reminded of the albatross’s association with luck or guilt or human burden, or ...”

“... that scientists don’t know whether or when major cod and haddock stocks will recover ... Robert Hache of the Association des Pêcheurs Professionels Acadiens said that the conclusions in the report are shocking even to fishermen used to declining stocks. ‘We see something that has never happened before in the northwest Atlantic,’ he said. ‘We ...”

“... eventually, a Nazi obsession. In the Fifties, it returns as something brighter. The voice of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies grew out of a negotiation between European and American traditions, not least English and American traditions, with the balance of power tilting decisively towards America. Lowell, coming from an East Coast Wasp society, is ...”

“... it strange to read an entry headed ‘Anomie’ that made no mention of Emile Durkheim or of Robert Merton. ‘Anomy’ is declared obs. by the OED but the French variant anomie stands for a sort of sociological deficiency disease: it refers to the ‘lost’ and rootless state of an individual or community that lacks norms of behaviour and behavioural ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs ...”

“... age. Anyhow, the version of anti-intellectualism that’s current is Psychological Darwinism, and Robert Kurzban’s new book is a typical instance. I’ll take a paragraph or two to sketch the connection between what Psychological Darwinists say and the anti-intellectualist thesis that there aren’t any minds. After that, I’ll focus on the latter, as does ...”

“... Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no longer look after him. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall ...”

“... belonging to David Wingate. We were going to Nonsuch Island, the home of the cahow, an oceanic bird that was believed extinct for more than 300 years. Invisible most of the time and, like most Bermudians, off at sea as often as possible, it is unique to Bermuda and now one of the rarest birds in the world. We met at Flatt’s Inlet and set off along the ...”

“... the historic actor, seems to walk on air as in a Chinese painting ... As is the nest, so is the bird.’ But, at the same time, ‘history itself is an enormous, and too often underestimated, moral fact ... Thus goes each people, making itself, engendering itself, mixing, amalgamating the elements ... In human progress, the essential part is the living ...”