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“... No one contemplating the events of the past few weeks can doubt that the complex and intractable conflicts of the Middle East pose a far greater threat to world peace than the ugly fight in the South Atlantic ever did. Despite the windy rhetoric about principles, the Falklands conflict has been a comparatively simple one about sovereignty over disputed territory, involving national prestige – and therefore the political survival of two governments (or rather juntas, one has been tempted to add, as the Westminster variety increasingly resembled its Argentine counterpart in shrillness and implacability ...”

“... used being utterly destitute of tone. It would be cheaper, and equally effectual, for Sir Michael to employ a stage carpenter to bang the orchestra door at a prearranged signal.’ ‘Why is it that the Master of Ravenswood, whenever he appears on the stage in the opera, proceeds to fling his cloak and hat on the ground with a melodramatic air? It is ...”

“... lengthy volumes. Tovey’s musical universe is founded on a line from the summit of baroque (Bach, Handel); to Viennese classicism, the triumph of tonality and the sonata principle (Haydn, Mozart, culminating in Beethoven); its expansion and decline alongside wonderful new possibilities in Schubert; its dilution and academicisation in Mendelssohn; new romantic ...”

“... Vauxhall’s main attraction was musical performance. English-based composers and performers, Handel especially, were favoured. A great crowd gathered to hear the rehearsal of Handel’s music for the royal fireworks on 21 April 1749; there was a three-hour traffic jam on London Bridge. Borg and Coke make the original ...”

“... and are surely right to go on feeling, that they know all about water-music, simply because of Handel. It is surprising how much of ordinary life turns out to be purely conceptual like this – in modern society, at any rate; and modernity probably started with the making of the Lascaux cave-paintings, themselves a kind of visual water-music. We think we ...”

“... Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island Discs, she chose Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest as her favourite book. Carmen wanted younger women, and men, to know that these foremothers had come through the wreckage and thought hard and brilliantly about it – the pregnant heroine of Lehmann’s The Weather in the ...”

“... 18th-century catgut? The oddest contribution – though also one of the most interesting – is Michael Spitzer’s analysis of the first movement of Symphony No. 46 in B and other pieces in terms of a theory of melody proposed by Eugene Narmour. The idea is that we perceive a minimal melodic event (the movement between two notes) according to its relation ...”

“... domestic and other curtains would have been almost negligible but for one episode recounted by Michael Freed-land. As an example of what he shyly calls Bernstein’s ‘other side’ the episode has a small but central place in his book; and the fact that its real significance seems to have been lost on him only adds to the verisimilitude of his ...”

“... Reading through the counterpointing essays of Randolph Trumbach, G.S. Rousseau, Arend Huussen and Michael Rey is like eavesdropping on a seminar. Participants in the debate argue about who did what to whom, how often and for how much in a way that reinforces rather than removes the sense of confusion about categories. Exchanging rival sets of ...”

“... them hysterical letters in the 1840s, trying to radicalise them about the Irish famine. This time, Michael Collins visits Kilneagh, as a friend. The Troubles come. The house is burnt and Willie Quinton’s father is killed with his dogs and servants, not by Irishmen resenting his English connections, but by Black and Tans avenging the hanging of an informer ...”

“... Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles estate, or at least its ...”

“... that he was a drinker with a writing problem. A man who could whistle a number of works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven from end to end, Shaw started out in London as a music critic. He was already engaged in the project of turning the obscure Bernard Shaw into the legendary GBS, a coinage of his own. The epithet ‘Shavian’ was another of his ...”

“... puritans of the genre (Gluck, Wagner, Birtwistle) as to the unapologetic sensualists (Handel, the Italians, Strauss): perhaps only Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande has successfully transcended this fundamental crudity of impact. In the period since Brecht’s strictures, however, a nouvelle cuisine has evolved, and the sort of opera performance ...”

“... also made use of instrumental curios: the metallic clink of the keyed glockenspiel, obsolete since Handel’s day, helped summon up the fantasy world of The Magic Flute. ‘The idea that Mozart was disengaged from the modern world, and oblivious to anything other than music is an enduring – if false – biographical trope that became common in the mid-19th ...”

“... me quote Winton Dean: There is a big difference between the comparatively rare occasions on which Handel passed off others’ compositions as his own and the far more numerous instances of his using the ideas of others as a jumping-off point for fresh composition. It may seem strange that he needed to do this, but it involves a creative process, not simple ...”