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“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation (1712), which for Guest illustrates the route to divine ...”

“... with language which produces felicities such as: ‘Not a blade of grass moved and not a bird flew down the perspective of the great water, but, under thickety trees, officers and children skated with coloured cloaks and gloves over a pond. Beyond, dazzling and enchanted, lay the leafless forest.’ Very finely crafted, too, though this love-affair ...”

“... presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and moral philosophers are ...”

“... Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers ...”

“... Press. During my visit I am informed that this first-ever biography of Kadar was inspired by Robert Maxwell during a visit to Budapest. People talk about Mr Kadar with an affection that surprises me. ‘He says in public what he says in private,’ says an editor I meet at a party, who considers that as rare a trait among politicians as I do. On the day ...”

“... concerned. Only a few weeks after Elizabeth’s funeral on 28 April 1603, her chief minister Sir Robert Cecil was saying of her that she was ‘more than a man, and, in troth, sometime less than a woman’. As James’s reign progressed, Cecil (like many others) became less and less inclined to be critical of ‘our blessed Queen’s time’, but his ...”

“... Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary kook’, as a haunted-looking man who was friendly to children. One visitor to ...”

“... has no desire to dwell among them:Noises at dawn will bringFreedom for some, but not this peaceNo bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient nowFor something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.The tranquillity of this has as much to do with what the words achieve as what they recollect. Not, perhaps, the peace which surpasseth understanding, more that ...”

“... and power.’ In 1938 Carrington and Ernst moved to a farmhouse in Provence, decorating it with bird and horse talismans to keep away disapproving parents and warring surrealists, as well as Ernst’s wife. But Max briefly returned to Marie-Berthe, and Carrington was left stranded, playing the role of ‘l’Anglaise’ at the local café like a ...”

“... rex, which evolved into birds, and type B, the armoured quadrupedal herbivore or ornithischian (‘bird hips’) epitomised by Triceratops, which, perversely, did not become birds but instead became extinct. Dinosaurs entered American history during the period of westward expansion, when big game was beginning to vanish and the dinosaur became ‘the biggest ...”

“... The blackbird already perched there stands his ground. Two rooks on another turret watch a fifth bird swoop off to the roofs beyond, while high and far above them in the pale morning sky, a kestrel wheels over the gables and pinnacles, seeing what I cannot, the countryside beyond the half-visible town gate. And then, to the right of the mullion in the ...”

“... beak hovering at the edge of her open mouth. She is older than the Jane of the novel, and the bird is gigantic. Her knees, covered by a dress of criss-crossed taffeta, are shaped like the ‘solitary rocks’ that Bewick says are ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’. The symbolism is of sacrifice or nurture – the pelican (not the first in Rego’s work) pierces ...”

“... Renaissance artists. The attempt to capture the imagined sensation of penetration by the powerful bird proved seductive to artists like Michelangelo, who in an extraordinarily highly charged drawing renders Leda overcome and languid under the swan’s nestling tensed body, coiled neck, lifted neb, unfurled erectile plumage and mighty webbed feet. A large egg ...”

“... treated his heroine without mercy. In The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel by the Scots poet Robert Henryson, Cresseid is reduced to prostitution and – by counsel of the gods – stricken with leprosy. Chaucer borrowed the plots of both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde from Boccaccio, who was still alive during his first trip to ...”