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“... or psychoanalyst’s. In ‘The Problem of Anxiety’, one of the clearer poems in Can You Hear, Bird, Ashbery, with his Waspish reticence, asks the reader (perhaps the psychoanalyst part of himself) how he would represent himself given the opportunity: Suppose this poem were about you, would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of ...”

“... or so ago: not many birds have a penis, but the stifftail duck does – it can be longer than the bird itself and is not, it would seem, easy to manage. The penis of a relative of the ruddy duck – the Argentine lake duck (Oxyura vittata) is shaped like a corkscrew and, at almost half a metre long, is the largest of any ...”

“... knocks, swishing and rubbing noises, repeated what seems an infinity of times? Like the noises of bird or animal in a nocturnal garden, these sounds assure him that she ultimately belongs, without consciousness or design, to a world in which he has no being. Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King ...”

“... Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a bird like two stones struck together (bird of reproof) through leaf-shimmer a moth-spot of white light sky washed an intense blue by yesterday’s rain, no vein of opal near the spring a red leaf-coloured frog the size of an ...”

“... 1960s, and in almost every instance a near or total disaster, he somehow made a success of it. Red Bird, commissioned by the BBC in 1959, features him reading his poems with the backing of the Tony Kinsey Quintet. It wasn’t a cakewalk. ‘I’m amazed,’ Kinsey was heard to remark to a band member, ‘he’s supposed to be fairly intelligent.’ ...”

“... of a pair of super-imposed isorhythmic sequences on piano and cello decorated with snatches of bird-song: the violin does a nightingale, the clarinet a blackbird. The movement does not develop in any way; the isorhythmic sequences continue for a time, the birds chatter and gurgle. Then it stops. It is as if one had been shown a sample of acoustic eternity ...”

“... The​ 1940s was the generative decade for American dance. George Balanchine, who was inching towards the founding of the New York City Ballet in 1948, produced eight works for other companies. Antony Tudor moved to New York from London in 1940 and quickly created two visions of psychosexual implosion, Pillar of Fire and Undertow ...”

“... is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page ...”

“... hooks on life in Scotland, mostly memoirs and mostly familiar to historians. Old friends include George Robertson, Joseph Mitchell, Thomas Somerville and Ramsay of Ochtertyre. The accounts are separated into themes, such as school, factory and mine, leisure, crime (though none of the memorialists claim active participation in this). The excerpts are long ...”

“... Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and ...”

“... struggle with depression. But Edward Thomas was, and is, greatly loved. His scholarly biographer, George Thomas, irritated as he is by what he calls the ‘dithering’ of Edward Thomas’s early life, treats him not only with respect but with love. Thomas saw himself with bitter clarity. ‘I suppose one does get help to some extent by being helpless, but ...”

“... its title. Not many readers will get the allusion here to Tocqueville and Beaumont in America by George Wilson Pierson, published in 1938 and for a long time the standard account of the nine-month journey which Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a report on the American prison system, but which ...”

“... period piece in themselves. For Beresford, the Norfolk parson was ‘that very rare and beautiful bird – a typical Englishman ... who loved his father and his family and his home with a completely contented love; he loved good food and good drink; he loved sport, especially coursing hares and fishing; he loved a country life; he loved established ...”

“... Two characters in pursuit of their author: such are George Neville and Witter Bynner, two chunks of raw material, anxious to tell the world about their cook. George Neville went to school with D.H. Lawrence and supposed himself the ‘original’ of George Saxton in The White Peacock: in his memoir he congratulates himself upon his useful contribution to Lawrence’s conception of true manliness ...”

“... In February 1932, on the occasion of George Moore’s 80th birthday, a group of distinguished London literati published an encomium in the Times paying homage to ‘a master of English letters’. Today there are few critics who would find a place for him in a pantheon of English novelists – of his 16 novels and numerous short stories, only Esther Waters counts as a ‘Penguin Classic ...”