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“... Westernisation-versus-Islamisation question through a modern device: instead of the usual cuckoo bird, two other figures had been employed, a tiny imam who appeared on the lower balcony at the proper time for prayer to announce three times that ‘God is great!’ and a minute toy gentleman wearing a tie but no moustache who showed up in the upper balcony on ...”

“... white sands of the Bahamas etc), announced that he was doing the same thing all over again. Early-bird tickets for Fyre II were said to have sold out overnight, most of them presumably snapped up by people hoping to write a viral article about the clowns who would pay for such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

“... out. The clue to this movement (which is confirmed as well as threatened by the flight of the bird at the end) is the odd striking word dropped into the Ode’s second line, the word ‘hemlock’. It was, I believe, because the poet so needed this particular word for an opiate that he allowed himself to half-quote an earlier half-line of verse, ‘like ...”

“... Only after such an inventory of difference can he gather the bird into one ‘inscape’. This is an effortful thing to do– to turn an object into an authentic symbol by synthesising all its separate qualities into a single whole: it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in ...”

“... own interest. Many a man, for instance, will envy Montgomerie’s sonnet to his lawyer: A Baxters bird, a bluiter beggar borne, Ane ill heud huirsone, lyk a barkit hyde, A saulles suinger, seuintie tymes mensuorne, A peltrie pultron poysond vp with pryde ... And a number of the poems have good bits, so that it is possible, by judicious quotation, to make ...”

“... with the shock of discoveringthat a Rand Daily Mail reporter, Patrick Laurence, had just shot his bird by publishing an excellent political history of Transkeiup to the eve of Independence, and wondering how he could rescue his own academic enterprise. He decided that, rather than wait a few years to write a political history of Transkei after ...”

“... fossil record, anxious as he had then been to dissociate himself from the Lamarckian atheism of Robert Grant. It is these twists and turns which make the intellectual history of Early Victorian science so captivating, and, when discussed in an essay of this quality, so rewarding. By emphasising the cultural context and cultural uses of different forms of ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... had been worn out only by student travels to Paris and Heidelberg and, almost certainly, Italy. Robert Tracy gives an account of the main influences in the air at the time of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone, here translated in toto into rhymed verse, with a parallel Russian text, an excellent introduction and very illuminating notes. Tracy evokes the world ...”

“... young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to ...”

“... to be grossly exploited when you can buy a small British chicken in Aldi for £1.87 and a medium bird for £3. The president of the British Veterinary Association and the head of food policy at Which? continue to insist that chlorine-washing chickens does mask dodgy animal husbandry and that rates of foodborne disease are far higher in the US.Nor are things ...”

“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

“... Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush     The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced     The new age with a tweet.The butcherbird is in fact native to Australia, but that doesn’t stop Hughes punning on its name in his off-kilter search for a way of introducing the massacres that followed the Russian Revolution. There’s a ...”