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“... conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his book was called The Successful High School Athletic Programme. Purdy remarked that if Robert or ...”

“... Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty of bullying her staff; so would Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, for a ripe lobbying scandal.As for policymaking, a concern for accuracy was supposed to go hand in hand with a thorough and detailed examination of pros and cons, a proper submission of papers and keeping of records, rather ...”

“... Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They ...”

“... own purposes. Hughes thought Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ no good, for instance, because the bird was so readily subservient to the theological programme Hopkins had devised for it: ‘the typical windhover of an Oxford don ignorant of the world actually inhabited by birds’, Hughes said. That was a bit rough on Hopkins, who was never an Oxford don and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... High Romantic, one moment tipping the wink to Eliot (‘The evening/Settles down like a brooding bird/Over streets that divide our life like a trauma’), the next indulging in some knock-about Elizabethan pastiche, before suddenly soaring on out-stretched wings through the Symbolist ether: The solemn symphony of angels lighting My steps with music, o ...”

“... a cryptic strangeness and resonance which baffle any attempt to reconstruct a likely context. ‘A bird was in the room.’ ‘Mineral water – once for fun I could ... ’ ‘A lake doesn’t flow into anything, you know.’ ‘So the help goes away again without helping.’ Kafka was reduced to these scribbled messages by an illness (tuberculosis of the ...”

“... onto the rope with one hand, establishing a hanging belay where he roosts like a large orange bird, I untie from my anchor and clamber down the groove. It should feel like lowering into a bottomless ocean but no, all is possible, at our command. Ed’s total competence flows along the rope. His smile of steady geniality, just visible, shows through the ...”

“... to the textbook view that John Locke’s contractual theory of government simply demolished Robert Filmer’s efforts at assimilating the authority of kings and fathers, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government did not drive patriachal ideas out of circulation. Indeed, it was Locke who was hardly read in the early 18th century: his ideas struck no ...”

“... of its upper works, inviting a comparison with Roman ruins that was enhanced by the flight of a bird of prey from the head-house at my approach. That sound was amplified when my foot crashed through a rotted plywood cover that had been laid over an open culvert. As I extricated myself, I reflected on my folly: had I sustained an incapacitating injury ...”

“... Magritte believed that some objects evoke others in non-obvious ways; rather than place the usual bird in a cage, why not a massive egg? The result is Elective Affinities (1933), a title that can stand for the series as a whole, for these pictures surprise us by way of an unexpected sympathy between things rather than an obvious disparity. By this time ...”

“... on ‘the grasses/Of the forest’s ferny floor’, while his knocking and smiting surprise a bird that flies up from a turret above his head; we learn that his eyes are grey, and that when he remounts to leave, the listeners hear ‘his foot upon the stirrup,/And the sound of iron on stone’.Like much of de la Mare’s best work, ‘The ...”

“... White’s face that challenges the viewer. ‘Black and white are the colours of photography,’ Robert Frank once remarked. ‘To me they symbolise the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing 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 ...”