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“... we come to Philip’s internal strife, we have to contend with the randy bonhomie of old King George. It is said that American viewers are distressed to find the word ‘cunt’ used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from ...”

“... the Edinburgh pavement and the causeway; and between the ghosts of the Edinburgh philanthropists George Watson and George Heriot. Fergusson’s poetics are naturally dialogic, confidently mixing genres, styles, Scots and English. This is apparent in another mode Fergusson is drawn to, the elegiac, or, often, the ...”

“... Once their enclosure, or loft, has been imprinted on them – something that happens when a bird is around six weeks old – homing pigeons will return to it for the rest of their lives, even after many years away. They can fly thousands of miles and cross oceans in order to get home. One of the longest homing flights ever recorded was made by a ...”

“... Charles and his sisters once feared might carry Erasmus off in marriage), Thomas and Jane Carlyle, George Eliot and G.H. Lewes. Cash and connections flowed through family channels, and it was the family, too, that could be relied on to nurse invalids, assist with experiments, edit manuscripts, write letters and keep importunate visitors at bay. This was the ...”

“... indeed the work of a natural, if by that we may mean someone who took to reading and writing as a bird to the wing, and who was a bit of a simpleton. In the supportive Introduction which he wrote in 1907 for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp George Bernard Shaw calls him an ‘innocent’. Davies – the wisest fool ever ...”

“... at best a minor or compromised one. It seems that the idea for this book came from a passage in George Steiner’s study of language and translation, After Babel – itself an intellectual adventure in the grand old conquistadorial manner. Steiner deplored the fact that, whereas a good many literary creators have left documentation, in the form of notes and ...”

“... Sloan’s etchings of New York tenements and city crowds (he, too, had worked for newspapers) and George Bellows’s lithographs of a prize fight, a psychiatric ward and couples in the park. In London and Paris, the illustrations that painters admired – some reproduced by wood engraving, some by lithography – were done by others. In America the ...”

“... she didn’t mince her words: ‘I hate it. It reminds me of some Nature-Lover Going Out Bird-Watching.’ It was 1957 and Sandler was interviewing Mitchell in her fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. Mitchell’s gestural paintings were admired for their glowing abstraction, suggestive of landscapes, but she was reluctant to let clichés ...”

“... of myths, turned this trope on its head in the early 1630s: for him Shakespeare was still a bird – a wood-warbler, apparently – but one who was to be identified not as a divine father but as a divinely parented infant. In ‘L’Allegro’, the lively extrovert of the title proposes an excursion to the theatre, where he and his companions may hear ...”

“... high places in theme pubs. The perfunctoriness of some of the labels here (where and when was the bird collected? What does the inscription say?) indicates that the history of the objects themselves is not quite the point.The character of the two displays is, in part at least, determined by the spaces they occupy. The first is new. The fittings are designed ...”

“... died in 1751, and the realisation of their plans had to await the accession of their son, George III. After 1760, Augusta spent more than £30,000 on Kew, and gave Capability Brown permission to level her mother-in-law’s follies. The Dowager Princess then employed William Chambers to build her own: a remarkable range of buildings, including a ...”

“... hunting and gathering of what is already there. When he offers this report to the Governor, Sir George Bowen, the latter’s incomprehension is meant, it seems, to illustrate another aspect of the settler failure to come to terms with the true inner reality of Australia. The exact nature of the potential ‘native’ vegetable-and meat-supply is not spelled ...”

“... for may not be there. Comics come off worse than straight actors (Harry Lauder makes it but not George Robey, Tommy Handley, or Morecambe and Wise). So in other fields. Bobby Charlton is in; Geoff Boycott isn’t. Piggott but not Carson. John Williams (the guitarist) but not Shirley. Healey but not Howe. John Le Carré but not Naipaul or Storey. Bud Powell ...”

“... the less patronisingly dismissed Jane Austen as ‘knowing no more of her process than the brown bird that sings on the orchard bough’, he forgot or ignored the fact that a highly skilled and instinctive artist may know very little about how his task came to be chosen, but a very great deal about how it was done. The process and impulse in these examples ...”

“... other, less enlightened images of heroic feminine masochism such as, topically, the legendary bird in Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, who impales her breast on the thorn tree ‘and dying, rises above her own agony to out-carol the lark’. Sadie is a bird of a different feather; nor is her self-mutilation the ...”