Throughout eight galleries, cranes and egrets roost in gilded screens, eagles swoop down on prey in hanging scrolls, sparrows and swallows variously flit across the black night of lacquer and the pure white of porcelain, and all manner of avian beauty graces works big and small.

WSJ: Flights of Feathered Fancy | Birds in the Art of Japan | Metropolitan Museum of Art | By Lee Lawrence

Instead of curling photographs and yellowing newspapers, we are possessed of a shiny and permanent now, one we flit-click about and so delude ourselves as to our own eternal youth - until, that is, we look down at the wrinkled and liver-spotted hands that rest on the keyboard.

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The special exhibit gallery has been transformed into an intimate garden where 20 different species of North American butterflies such as monarchs, Western swallowtails, red admirals and even giant moths, flit from brightly coloured daisies, sunflowers, zinnias and other dazzling flowers.

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The shop is modeled after a London townhouse in the 1920s, and merry women dressed in black and white maid costumes flit about the crowd waiting to enter the store.

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Instead, when the subject demands it, he manages deftly to flit back and forth among the decades (throughout the book, he is particularly good on the regular outbreaks of labour unrest, be it in the San Francisco dockyards or the fields of the Central Valley).

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But the biggest problem may be the sheer complexity of doing ad campaigns that can reach consumers who increasingly flit from computer to smartphone to tablet and back throughout the day.

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These days, as opposition politicians flit from one party to another, an announcement on the date of parliamentary and presidential elections is keenly awaited.

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In Prospect Park alone, at least 90 species of native bees flit from flower to flower among the park's sun-dappled golden rod, dandelions and dogwood.

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