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“... in, and she enters the crypt alone. ‘Three kinds of space dominate all Tarkovsky’s films,’ Robert Bird writes: ‘nature, the home, and the shrine or cathedral.’ The ‘cathedral space is demonstrated most fully at the beginning of Nostalghia . . . in the rigorously geometrical yet disconcertingly elusive space of a columned crypt’. One ...”

“... a characteristic space between her front teeth … Everyone in Paris liked her. She was pure as a bird, delicate yet firm in conscience.’ Levertov thought Mailer, who had just published The Naked and the Dead, ‘a nice Jewish boy’ and a ‘friendly, modest, humorous person’. His ‘overnight success’, she told her parents, ‘doesn’t seem to have ...”

“... a person from Phoenicia, it can refer to a palm tree, a deep red-purple colour and the mythical bird. There are only five Greek-language inscriptions in which people identify themselves as Phoenician, and just one of them – a bilingual funerary marker erected in Athens for a certain Antipatros of Ashkelon in the third century BC – seems definitively to ...”

“... by the age of 50. Not so repentant as startled, As in a movie where the dying man Gazes at some bird or cloud But still wouldn’t go to church Even if he could be carried. Among those middens of doubt Escaping seemed like a robust plan. But he didn’t know precisely What she was talking about. Her white dog was leaping straight up For no reason, a dog ...”

“... in America are descended From ones imported because a certain man Wanted a park with every bird mentioned by Shakespeare. The birds are a pest, they drive out native species In the world’s rivalrous web of exterminations And propagating shadows, the net of ...”

“... I, sidewinder. I, archaeopteryx. I, hoatzin. I, heron. I, king penguin. I, saddle-billed stork. I, bird of paradise. I, cormorant. I, bower bird. I, macaque. I, cassowary. I, darter. I, armadillo. I, marmoset. I, bluebell. I, humpbacked whale. I, possum. I, spruce. I, sequoia. I, gibbon. I, zebra. I, wild ...”

“... rarely, always at the sales. Upstairs in one of two mahogany wardrobes He hangs it like a shot bird to be cured, New for a decade, it takes on the smell Of jackets round it, his scent, the reek of mothballs. On coathangers, suspended in the dark, Herringbone accepts the gift of waiting. Unseasoned pockets sense how ripened pockets Enfold receipts and ...”

“... badu hunting techniques is also instructive. These are wonderfully elaborate. In order to catch a bird in the desert, you must first find a tethered goat and then rub salt in its ear in order to extract a blood-filled tick and then tie a thread round the tick’s abdomen. Leave the tick with its thread weighted down on an exposed rock and wait for a ...”

“... Who can see the green earth any moreAs she was by the sources of Time?Who imagines her fields as they layIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?Matthew Arnold, ‘The Future’Barley field, cut, dried,Brewed, poured, you’re so garrulousLong after you’ve gone.Old English riddle from the Exeter Book                    I                        1What rutting beast snorts‘Let me give you some pointers’Then trots through the mist?                        2In the beginningWas the Word, and the Word wasParsed into creatures ...”

“... was 5'4" and weighed 100 lbs: vital statistics for a man who had always wanted to be a bird. Growing up on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil, he had watched eagles ‘flying so high and soaring on their great outstretched wings’, and had fallen in love with the ideals of ‘space and freedom’. In 1891, the family moved to Paris. When ...”

“... friend: he beats his friend as hard as he can, for that is his duty. Leo then tells the story of a bird that could live either on land or under the water. When the king of the birds demands taxes from him, the bird professes himself to be a creature of the water and retreats there. But when the king of the fishes, in ...”

“... course, can’t fly, and there is a characteristic irony in Bishop’s identifying herself with a bird that can gain access to the skies only by gazing at her blue balloon. Bishop often likened poetic composition to an attempt to get airborne. ‘It is hard,’ she wrote in her notebook around 1937, ‘to get heavy objects up into the air; a strong desire to ...”

“... 18 inches into the air. But until the end of her life she believed that one day she would catch a bird in mid-flight just below the clouds. On the back cover of Letters to a Grandson, Lord Home is pictured at Eton standing beside Matthew, the recipient of the correspondence. The fly-leaf expresses the hope that Matthew won’t object to publication. Lord ...”

“... stories, with only one or two exceptions, come in the wake of break-ups. The lover – the bird or bard – has flown. The reader may very well think this is no bad thing. Williams’s leavers are all-rounders, shining, uncomplicated, confident, bossy creatures, ‘free to play or free to slack’, as Robert Lowell ...”

“... A memorable image in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner’s magisterial works of cultural history is somewhat similar: the cool temperature, the graceful touch, the sensation of resistance being gently annihilated under an accumulation of brilliant particularity ...”