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“... at the beginning.’ Daily life there ‘added up to one long steady protest’, with poets – Robert Duncan, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder – joining in: the engagé styles that repelled other American writers showed Heaney ‘what it meant to be American. There was a trust that things could be changed.’America meant ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... a systems manager. The cuckoo lays her eggs in other birds’ nests, he tells us, and ‘another bird will raise her young.’ By exploiting a little-known hole in a text-editing program common to many large systems called Gnu-Emacs, the hacker is able to lay an egg-program in the computer’s operating system that hatches to grant him the privileges of a ...”

“... Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.’ In spite of these omissions, Sara Maitland has found in her own fiction ‘a pride in the Sixties’, a regret for ‘a period that was culturally significant, an explosion of energy’, which she contrasts with the shameful ...”

“... up dipping the hot fruit into cold water, seeing the thin skin come off like red rubber gloves. A bird was singing piercingly in the garden and a cloud of gnats danced outside the kitchen window. And all day the telephone went on ringing like a motif in an opera. And again, at a difficult time in her life: I feel rather like a bat hanging upside down in the ...”

“... as well as the literary imagination that went with them. The baroque personality, like the Irish bird, can easily be in two places at once. The shorter pieces in this book are equally fascinating. There is Mozart as a letter-writer, and Mozart with Da Ponte and with Jane Austen; an essay ‘In Praise of Ms Navratilova’, and another doing the same for Lodge ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”

“... as an undetermined field. Twombly studied in Boston and Lexington, and in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. The two of them spent time at Black Mountain College in 1951. Twombly’s early works, and many of the later ones, make sense as an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism. But it wasn’t the openness of Kline or Pollock that he was drawn ...”

“... on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... it was a certain stately presence, a gloved hand, the remembrance how the feathers of a beautiful bird’s wing had been showered down upon the floor, and how the light white down upon a robe had stirred and rustled, as in the rising of a distant storm. These were the things he carried with him as he turned away again, and rode through the darkening and ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clarity of her sentences and the simplicity of their deployment. ‘The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin in a corner of a house made out of wood.’At the ...”

“... had the unfortunate connotation of fetishism, as well as stigmatising their wearers as bird-brained. Similarly, high hair excited public derision and a quasi-sexual disgust. It required one to kneel, not sit, inside a carriage. It required hairdressers who stood on ladders. Indeed, hairdressers were exalted as never before. Until ...”