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“... Or of the famous arbitrariness of the sign: ‘a “borogove” is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round – something like a live mop.’ Try working that out from the name. Compared with these astonishing jinks Joyce’s antics can look almost reasonable. In relation to ‘jabberwocky’, say, a ‘jibberweek’ seems ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thrush. Catching sight of some interesting trees at Kataoka, I wrote: While waiting For the bird to sing Shall I stand In the grove at Kataoka And feel the drops of dew? Unlike the imperial new-born, the translations in this volume are swaddled in nearly impermeable layers of editorial matter: prefaces, appendices, groundplans and some murkily ...”

“... his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks Richard far too modern. Richard wins Robert’s girlfriend, Nelly Moreton, although Richard fears she is too young for him: they have much in common, Richard and Nelly, both being ...”

“... called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in her prose. One function of the novel is the commemoration and celebration of Sassoon and Owen. Robert Graves is a more equivocal spectre. The cadences of Goodbye to All That have sounded in Barker’s work before. In a climactic moment towards the end of The Century’s Daughter a social worker rescues the parrot belonging to the book’s dead heroine. He ...”

“... notes that many of those rivals are on the record as having killed some of their clients. Take Mrs Bird, one of Restell’s main competitors in the 1830s and 1840s, who sold ‘tonic renovating vegetable pills’, marketed euphemistically as being for ‘females in delicate health’. In 1841, Bird was discovered trying to ...”

“... great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are ...”

“... be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its ...”

“... Eliot touch, not even the sound of water, not even the imitation of the sound of water by a bird, for example. Relief can’t even be faked. Some would argue that Eliot never entirely threw off The Waste Land, and others that he did and to his cost, but either way it’s clear he wanted to work at getting beyond it. He had published the poem in October ...”

“... of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture. I take these quotations from Robert Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James ...”

“... Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in 1937, where the second volume left off ...”

“... remembers the optician, ‘busying himself on top of me, inside me, beneath me, while I observed a bird on the other side of the car door’. Dissociation has become the basis for fiction and so, the narrator notes, ‘everything was right with the world … you only had to pay – as I had always known and believed – close attention for a terrible joy to be ...”

“... we drop down into Kendal and the Abbot Hall gallery, where there is a touring exhibition of Robert Bevan pictures. The shows at Abbot Hall are just the right size, and never more than three or four rooms. The Bevans are shown alongside other Camden Town paintings, the best of which is a lovely, glowing, slightly abstract picture by Spencer Gore, The ...”