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“... in a providential state of natural goodness (and possessed untrammelled innocence). Carroll met George MacDonald in Eastbourne in 1854, at the speech therapist’s where he tried to cure his stammer; structural and thematic coincidences abound between Phantasties and the Alice books, as the MacDonald scholar John Docherty has patiently analysed, and the ...”

“... a town mouse who finds himself in deepest and darkest Dorset, looking after Marjorie, a tough old bird who drives an Alfa-Romeo and dies gamely of cancer. Greg becomes her handyman, confidant, protegé and son. Meantime he remembers his own parents who died gamely of cancer, and fights (literally, in the end) for the affections of a local farm-girl. Benson is ...”

“... specimens in the Rio Negro for the Paris Muséum. Still, his haul was tremendous: rock samples, bird skins, pickled flatworms, ground sloth fossils (bought from a gaucho for two shillings). ‘His companions on the Beagle,’ writes Ronald Clark, ‘soon ceased to wonder at the young man who caught 68 species of beetle in a single day and shot 80 species of ...”

“... a poem which was ‘unsurprisingly rejected’ by Chambers; the lines ‘Now, Parrot, my sweet bird, speak out yet once again,/ Set aside all sophisms, and speak now true and plain’ seem to have some bearing on the present subject. I’m not sure that ‘rejected’ is quite the right word in this connection: but there is something more distinctly awry ...”

“... recur in Barker’s fiction), a pacifist now imprisoned for an improbable plot to poison Lloyd George with curare. Her cell is under unremitting surveillance, and the spyhole in the door is surrounded by an elaborately painted eye. Increasingly convinced that she has been clumsily framed by the Intelligence Unit that employs him, Prior’s loyalties are ...”

“... the spiritual and religious concerns of The Aerodrome, hinted at by the epigraph, a verse of George Herbert’s about sin and love. Rex Warner was a Classical scholar, and his prose – carved, marble-hard, balanced – reads like a very good translation of Classical Latin. The story he tells, with children’s discovery of lost parents and of parental ...”

“... Technology and bureaucracy are, of course, finally defeated. Marcom disappears, like the fabled bird, up one of its own Slow Time cabins. A heroic band escapes to the real world outside. On April Fool’s day, the BBC ran a spoof news story, in which it was alleged that Brussels had issued strict regulations as to the tread legally required on Community ...”

“... to have love affairs and yet not to be sentimental. It gave me a feeling of very pedantic wit and bird-like morals.’ Benson was content to be a sexless Ariel, separating platonism from passion, love from taint, hoping at best to frolic, an aging walrus with a playful kitten, and sadly recording in 1913 that he had never kissed. Occasionally he vaguely ...”

“... or those who walk for the sake of the experience. Wordsworth and Coleridge did this, and so did George Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath ...”

“... since March,’ Brit Bennett said of her new novel. The Vanishing Half came out a week after George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black ...”

“... Iraq, who built a boat to preserve his family and the birds and beasts he took on board. The first bird released after six days of floods ‘flew to and fro but found no resting place’. The similarity between this text and the narrative of the Flood in Genesis caused a sensation after the tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh in northern Iraq in ...”

“... Wear. Her body was found the next morning in the derelict Old Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he suffered. He was surprised by the islands of Lombock and Bali where Australian and Asian bird faunas were insulated from each other by a strait only ten miles wide. The central isle of the Malay archipelago, Celebes, surprised him again, for instead of finding inhabitants typifying the richness of the whole archipelago, he found it parsimonious of ...”

“... Water, which was set in the Caribbean and starred Michael Caine. O’Brien’s partner was George Harrison, who didn’t like the pig film either, and it’s evidence of Michael Palin’s generosity that he remained on good terms with the pair of them. At one point in the book my spirits rise when I read: ‘Denis is in a very bad way.’ Alas it turns ...”