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“... Trying to pin Ravel down,’ Roger Nichols writes in his penultimate paragraph, ‘is about as futile as trying to catch Scarbo in a bucket.’ It may seem a disconcerting admission to find at the end of a 350-page biography; but in fact it’s a positive and exact assessment, characteristically honest, and at the same time a high compliment to its subject ...”

“... since much of it was farmed out) than have many commentators. He informs us that, ‘according to Roger Ducasse, Debussy admired the orchestration of [the opera] Pénélope and compared it with that of Parsifal,’ and concludes his discussion with an italicised allusion to Debussy’s description of his aims in his late sonatas: ‘The truth is that ...”

“... for violin, each accompanied throughout by the simplest possible throb of chords on the piano. As Roger Nichols wrote twenty years ago, ‘the two accompanied solos for stringed instruments and the third movement for clarinet alone cannot be appreciated by, and could not have been written by, a man in a hurry.’ The first movement consists of a pair of ...”

“... Tuder of Checkendon, Rich Large, Lame, Lecherous and Impertinent’), and he was credited by John Nichols in the 19th century ‘for his Industry in preserving our National Remains’. Curll published good as well as bad scholarship and criticism (the manuscript reference to ‘Home Defended, an intriguing item,’ which Baines and Rogers ‘have not been ...”

“... nation. The BBC bureaucrats, for their part, looked on the likes of Potter and David Mercer, Peter Nichols and David Rudkin as the means of fulfilling their commitment to public service broadcasting, which, of necessity included ‘the arts’. Somewhere in between, the executive producer Sydney Newman, the playwright Troy Kennedy Martin, the producer Kenith ...”

“... out the occasions when a dedication got overtaken by events like divorce and re-marriage. Beverley Nichols, the wastrel, is said to have gone in for ‘sniping’. If you want a good book on dedications, look out for a second-hand copy of Henry B. Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books to Patron and Friend: A Chapter of Literary History (1887). Room lists it in ...”

“... traveller will turn at once to more interesting accounts of Central Africa by Westerners (Conrad, Roger Casement, Hergé, Redmond O’Hanlon, anything but RPY). But this guide for people who live in a fog of adrenaline scores high by including the United States on its list, proudly sandwiched between Russia and ‘Zaire’ under ‘Criminal Places’. In the ...”

“... Even with these short cuts, and even with the assistance of the aspiring young antiquary John Nichols, Johnson could not keep pace with the expectations of the commercial press. The prefaces, indeed, became postfaces: the first 22 lives appeared in 1779, after the volumes of poems to which they were supposed to be prefixed had been printed. Johnson toiled ...”