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“... others shouting, while one demented wretch shrieked at short and regular intervals like a tropical bird. Almost worse was a big dull-eyed woman who sat bolt upright in her bed, oblivious to the surrounding tumult, as silent and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of ...”

“... thousand distinguished fashionables’. On 12 April, she was received at Carlton Palace by King George IV, who, it was reported, ‘expressed great pleasure at her appearance’. So many people came to see Crachami that she was soon exhausted. In fact, she may have died of exhaustion, though it was more probably TB. On Thursday, 3 June, she received more ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.’ 30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother ...”

“... has become an American protectorate, and America has told Syria that it must, like a rare breed of bird, adapt to the new environment or die. The Syrian Army and Intelligence Services are playing their own imperial game in Lebanon, but their presence there has become as vulnerable to American subversion as America’s forces are to indigenous resistance ...”

“... but meanwhile they merely tried to put him off. Just before he was due to perform in the ‘Blue Bird’ pas de deux he was given telegrams from his father, his mother and his teacher, Pushkin, respectively denouncing him as a traitor, cajoling him into returning and prophesying the loss of his technique. At the same time French Communists had been sent out ...”

“... attractive work’, Milton gives thanks to God chiefly for three reasons. The first, in George Burnett’s 1809 translation, is that I was born in those times of my country, when the effulgent virtue of its citizens – when their magnanimity and steadiness, surpassing the highest praise of their ancestors, under the inspection of God first ...”

“... yellow breasts, which seem to be nesting in the creeper rather than by the beck, which is what the bird book says they should be doing. Chrissie opposite says she has a couple of yellow wagtails in her garden, but she is much nearer the water. Not sure how common grey wagtails are, I knock on Timmy Hutchinson (Timmy the Twitcher)’s door to tell him so that ...”

“... before, that he had sucked up to Williams in a queenly manner and that, in the opinion of ‘The Bird’ (Vidal’s usual term for Tennessee’s person of plumage and flutter), he was an old gentleman ‘with urinestained flies’. Thus the newer version is more instructive and nearer to the nitty, if not indeed the actual gritty. In a letter to Jack Kerouac ...”

“... different periods of time. Each poem in Clavics looks like a key constructed from shape poems by George Herbert: the blade of the key is a double-decker version of Herbert’s ‘The Altar’, while the handle has the bird-shaped narrow waist of ‘Easter Wings’: ‘I am good for nothing/Else these days than making of ...”

“... the voice of young Laura: ‘birds’-nesting was a cruel sport … “Oh dear! What must the poor bird have felt” was Laura’s cry. But the boys only laughed and pushed her aside.’ In the later books she scorns her youthful sentiments; her retrospective admiration for, even defence of, the toughness and staunch inflexibility of rural life, the ...”

“... intrigued her, even if at first she told her friend Eleanor Roosevelt that he was an ‘odd bird’ and she was more interested in a nameless but decorative Swedish ‘bum’. Spain was the place to be, she said later, the place where a titanic confrontation was being played out at ‘one of those moments in history when there was no ...”

“... he didn’t object to being teased about his ‘humble origins’ by the Hollywood director George Cukor, who to rub it in once sent a green Rolls-Royce to chauffeur him along Sunset Boulevard to Cukor’s house. The two became friends while working on an ill-fated film (later described as one of ‘the most expensive flops in movie history’) called ...”

“... cheekbone and glittering, oddly skewed eyes, A.B. Craig bore a disconcerting resemblance to the bird of prey that punningly adorned the school coat of arms. Along with his twin brother, whose name we could see high up on the roll of honour, Craig had fought at the Somme: according to school legend a shell had landed on their platoon, killing his twin and ...”

“... by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, to prevent George Galloway from publishing photographs of him on the internet. But those who are keen to see privacy protected by law were making a mistake if they cheered or jeered at the court’s refusal to protect Mahmood from the kind of exposure to which his paper ...”

“... his own brand of Southern Gothic: ‘Now there are a great many dogs in this town, rat terriers, bird dogs, bloodhounds; they trail along the forlorn noon-hot streets in sleepy herds of six to a dozen, all waiting only for dark and the moon, when straight through the lonesome hours you can hear them howling: someone is dying, someone is dead.’ Many of the ...”