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“... This is dangerous territory, but it will be clear to anyone who has read Franzen’s essay ‘My Bird Problem’ in The Discomfort Zone that Walter’s agony about songbirds is shared, passionately, by his author. However, when Walter rages against the fragmentation of bird habitat to Richard, this is Richard’s ...”

“... after eight my little Waldo ended his life.’ He gave up ‘his little innocent breath like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous hymns to nature or self-reliance seem less vital than the radical provocations of his friends Whitman and Thoreau. Yet there is nothing sepia about the words he scratched into his journal ...”

“... In a certain sense, I have never exactly ‘made’ a story. With me the process is much more like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of these pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up. If you were very lucky (I have ...”

“... had gone wide of the mark and crashed through the animal’s eye. As it thrashed around in agony, George had just stood there, quivering and numb. It was left to Dorothy to fetch a clamp, secure the bloody, squealing creature by the nostrils and knock it dead with one almighty swing of the hammer. ‘Men!’ she had muttered, in a scornful tone of voice, and ...”

“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who ...”

“... village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France profonde based on the region, though writing the railway out and standardising her peasant characters’ French to make it comprehensible. The ...”

“... eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the battle cruiser Renown, which used 35,798 ...”

“... as a scientist. A stranger who rides in from the Karoo tells him a story – ‘The Search for the Bird of Truth’. But Waldo, though he understands the allegory, dies without getting his opportunity, ‘In after years,’ Olive wrote, ‘we cry to Fate, “Now, deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will, but let us never again suffer as we suffered ...”

“... gifted men attached to that endeavour: the director was Peter Brook; the choreographer, George Balanchine; Oliver Messel was responsible for the legendarily enchanting decor and costumes.’ Fey, Warholish asides about literature just can’t be shut out (‘I like Agatha Christie, love her. And Raymond Chandler is a great stylist, a poet. Even if ...”

“... Table. His fever-stricken and apparently demented curate, Forsythe, has even stuffed a white bird, approximating to a dove, which is to be hung above the altar to represent the Holy Ghost in flight; moreover, he has obliged their dog to fast during Lent. This latter is a nice stroke of humour, since all dogs in India live on the edge of starvation. The ...”

“... bloke to ten years’ imprisonment – he fell down the stairs. (Laughs) ... So I decided to do me bird, come out, turn it all in and finish it. Who says that judges don’t have a sense of humour? Moira, a dope-dealer – they are not quite all businessmen – recounts a narrow squeak. She had been in her car with four kilos of dope and a passenger well ...”

“... the sexual habits of each others’ mothers, while forceful white fathers, called things like ‘Bird’ and ‘Buck’, tend to beat their children. Truck Schultz mouths off on air because as a boy he was too much of a wimp to kill a deer. As for Dr Clarence Mather, who teaches a course called Introduction to Native American Literature – well, Marie ...”

“... politics are condemned by Plumb as a chaotic and expensive drag on social progress – by the time George IV died, the system was wholly rotten. Clark’s vision of the end of the Ancien Régime is a tragic one. 1829 (a more crucial date than 1832) marks the death of the confessional state: with Catholic Emancipation and the beginnings of Parliamentary ...”

“... extraordinary success was interpreted as an anomaly. She styled herself as a Romantic genius like George Sand, to whom she was constantly compared, and seemed to transcend the constraints of her sex.‘Women’s rights! – women’s nonsense!’ she complained in the 1850s. ‘Women should seek to establish their rights by good and great works, and not by ...”

“... time before trailing along Victoria Street to spend the night in the refuge in the basement of St George’s Church, where occasionally I would do night duty myself, sleeping on a camp bed in a room full of these sad, defeated, utterly unthreatening creatures. With its mixture of readers and its excellent facilities (it was a first-rate library) and the ...”