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“... mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits, and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Crewe argues that the ‘liberated’ masculine soul in the poem is in fact ‘an exotic figure of ...”

“... name of Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative biographies of Torquemada and Cesare ...”

“... The pictures were not well arranged or dusted – when I took one down, the skeleton of a small bird fell out from behind it. ‘They do not belong to me,’ Lydia would say emphatically, and in most cases this was true. Keynes had bequeathed them to King’s College, Cambridge, stipulating that they should remain with Lydia during her lifetime. In ...”

“... of dealers and other intermediaries (he described Joseph Duveen as a ‘serpent charming a bird’). Velázquez’s Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, on Horseback was bought for him by his mother. Huntington imposed on himself a rule to buy only outside Spain – ‘to Spain I do not go as a plunderer,’ he declared – although as an amateur ...”

“... get the papers this morning, but when I draw nearer it takes off and flaps up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry ...”

“... all he was content to show, for more than thirty years of story-writing. One thinks, he said, of George Sand turning out volume after volume while never once neglecting a love affair, never missing one puff of her hookah. Well, no matter, O’Faolain has done many other things and written many other books besides his collections of stories. He has been, he ...”

“... and down-beat, sometimes brutal and sometimes (perhaps just once) tender. Ruby’s parents are George and Berenice, who own a pet shop. They are not working-class people; they belong to the shop-keeping classes, which are different. By the date of the Queen’s coronation – Ruby is one of the first babies of the new Elizabethan Age – they own a ...”

“... she celebrated Trollope at a time when nobody read him. Against the current of opinion she admired George Saintsbury, and when she became editor of the Dial commissioned work from this writer, already over eighty and hardly to be thought of as belonging to any avant-garde. Indeed her notion of what was worth having, whether avant-garde or not, was based on ...”

“... of good and evil, one which stands in for historical and political investigation. He thus shares George W. Bush’s view of ethics, the only difference between the Marxist and the neo-conservative on this score being that Bush approves of such simple-minded oppositions whereas Jameson does not. Again and again in his work, he has set up this tattered straw ...”

“... travesties of justice – notably the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, which gave birth to the #BlackLivesMatter movement – alongside many more ambiguous affronts (such as the lack of nominees of colour at the 2015 Academy Awards, which gave birth to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign), the rapturous, impossibly ...”

“... Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love ...”

“... said to that?’ We know the answer: ‘Not the same thing a bit!’ Another minister of religion, George MacDonald, obliquely got to grips in his fiction with certain doctrinal problems which agitated him, and ended by supplying for his readers a good dose of ‘spiritual nourishment’, even if he couldn’t tell the difference between his grandmother and ...”

“... up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu – a seafood salad – while Shawn had a bowl of cornflakes ...”

“... meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental utopian to be disappointed. In domestic affairs, Obama’s obeisance to the Washington consensus led him to abandon the bold approach he ...”

“... for mostly have to do with his difficulties getting published: ‘My play in French,’ he tells George Reavey of Eleutheria, ‘was almost taken by Hussenot-Grenier,’ while ‘Watt was “nearly” taken in London, I forget by whom’ (a footnote informs us that Herbert Read at Routledge read the novel with ‘considerable bewilderment’ and found it ...”