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“... bought the house in which I shall be murdered.’There are different accounts of how Bacon met George Dyer late in 1963. One is that Dyer, a rather good-looking cat burglar from the East End of London, fell through Bacon’s skylight like a gift from heaven, and that Bacon threatened to call the police if Dyer didn’t have sex with him. They are more ...”

“... broad a concept that it explains everything and nothing. Towards the end of the book, he quotes Dr George Moore’s Man and His Motives, published in 1848: The infant no sooner moves its limbs, and feels that they are moved at its will, than it begins to enjoy itself in the use of its own power, for power is evinced only in action, and every action is a ...”

“... a novel, the diary that Lenin ought to have kept, but didn’t. For the first few weeks, the caged bird sang. Then, when I had finished Lenin’s childhood, I realised something I should have understood before I started. I could invent his comments, thoughts, feelings on any subject where these could only be guessed. But if I wanted to be taken seriously as a ...”

“... its intended purpose because we had to keep the windows open to avoid death by poison gas. George McGovern was running for President, Edward Heath was prime minister, and our landlord had yet to discover how to make water hot. Sick dialogue came easy in Norwich. What Ian always had was a great library, an ominous tide of titles that splashed out of ...”

“... as the mother whose caresses would calm his frenetic disposition. Together with Watts Dunton and George Borrow – then over seventy – he would bathe in the Putney ponds ‘with a north-east wind cutting across the icy waters like a razor’. No towels of course: Borrow would run about the grass like an elderly dog, shaking himself to get dry. For ...”

“... original molecules. Some preservation methods are more effective still. In 1982, the entomologist George Poinar and electron microscopist Roberta Hess published a paper on a 40-million-year-old fossil fly stuck in a glob of amber. Exquisite images taken with Hess’s instruments reveal individual cells in the fly’s abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic ...”

“... across the street from the church, in a section of the island called Sandy Ground. His name is George Hunter and he is 87 years old. One summer Saturday Mitchell takes the ferry from Manhattan to visit him. He finds Mr Hunter at home, in a tidy shingle-front house with lightning rods. A trellised rambler rose shades his screened front porch. ‘Come on ...”

“... every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’ Some of ...”

“... The narrator tells us later that before he went to France to fight he had ‘never shot at a bird or an animal in my life’ – so his first targets were humans. Sassoon’s attitude to blood sports, as to most other things, was not without its complexities. All I felt at that moment was extreme annoyance at the in-and-out running of the adult world. If ...”

“... he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different way. My friend Heather said he kept asking about me. ‘He thinks you look like a young Liv Ullmann.’ I wasn’t interested in David. He was four years younger than me and seemed immature. Since I was ...”

“... In​  The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC ...”

“... let die. Many of his poems are in praise of continuity: For continuity, A place of your own Where bird, wind passes through. The new book marks Hamburger’s 60th birthday and forty years of intermittent poetry. Many of the poems celebrate ‘natural time’s repetitions’, as in flowers, trees, a cat’s custom. For consolation, Hamburger’s muse runs to ...”

“... had descended in the dead of the night and knocked me up. (‘My mother’s a Jew, my father’s a bird,’ Buck Mulligan sings in Ulysses.)Pregnancy begins as speculation. This exhibition reminds us that for most of history – before it was possible to pee on a stick and wait for a pink line, or to see a foetus via ultrasound – doctors had no failsafe way ...”

“... the eyes of God. Nowhere is this shift from margin to centre more striking than in the career of George Bernard Shaw. Born in Dublin in 1856 into a decayed branch of the Protestant Ascendancy, the son of a drunken petty official and a mother from the minor gentry, Shaw was in his own word a ‘downstart’. In this superbly perceptive study, Fintan O’Toole ...”

“... White Blossom’, Leda’s swan is no match for an ‘original white, by which the ravishing bird looks wan’. The poem invokes Yeats in order to try to surpass him, but can only do this by subtraction – the swan becomes wan by losing its front letter. The image of Leda and the Swan is overcome only by an absence of image: by whiteness. Watkins is ...”