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“... In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011) by the American writer George Prochnik shows how ideas of silence slide from literal to figurative as he roams through contemporary multi-track soundscapes made up of sirens, jingles, muzak, bleeps and ringtones, roaring restaurants and bars, police helicopters hovering menacingly over ...”

“... forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise. Stevie Smith, herself an odd bird passionately attached to a maternal aunt (though not in quite the same way), called them ‘that odd amalgam of aunt and niece’. ‘Amalgam’ nicely captures the competing elements that came to be known as a singular author, Michael Field.Bradley was born ...”

“... been a hybridising of science writers, nature journalists, writer-scientists. Diane Ackerman and George Schaller are representative of either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New Yorker, on which ...”

“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... intolerably on our nerves, nothing but an ‘Odd Bod’, as his fellow students claim, ‘a queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk’, we glimpse him through the loving eyes of his father, his one Oxford friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante Gabriel Rossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sing, and ultimately did soar and did sing, as much as his near namesake and exemplar Suibhne, the bird-bard whose story Heaney adapted in Sweeney Astray (‘I prefer the elusive/rhapsody of blackbirds/to the garrulous blather/of men and women’). Here, he was given the greatest possible distance to travel, in the form of his Northern Irish birthright: a ...”

“... to quit was Ismaïl Cem, the Foreign Minister, a respected intellectual whose warm relations with George Papandreou, his Greek counterpart, led to the remarkable rapprochement between the two Aegean neighbours. Cem was quickly followed by Kemal Dervis, the guarantor of Turkey’s international credit line. In the confusion following their ...”

“... has become so familiar, at least in the States, that it’s approaching the folkloric status of George Washington and the cherry tree. The brilliant Kenyan father meeting the mother at the University of Hawaii, where her father had moved for a job; Obama Senior going off to Harvard to take his doctorate and then continuing back to Kenya, leaving Barack and ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”

“... young Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by Rosenberg, who realised he had to ‘disturb him a little’. In one scene, he told him: ‘Shit, we’ve ...”

“... To suggest, as David Solkin does in his conclusion, that Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on the Bird in the Air Pump can ‘offer us a timely word of warning, before we join the chorus of acclamation for those market forces we see marching in apparent triumph across the world today’ is to take a Haydonesque leap into bathos. Solkin’s is not the only ...”

“... history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The ...”

“... and always attentive to the chance that superstition might contain its portion of truth. George Santayana, James’s student and colleague, said ‘he gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . Thus William James became the friend and helper of those ...”

“... they hold as to the country’s standing in the United States actually survive the Presidency of George W. Bush, would do well to read Skidelsky’s account of Anglo-American negotiations during the Second World War. It would be wrong to think that failure, or relative failure, is the only theme of this volume. There is the constant pleasure of reading ...”