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“... Stravinsky was a dull correspondent, but at least he was Stravinsky. His wife’s letters to him, which preponderate over his to her in Robert Craft’s new selection of Stravinskyiana, Dearest Bubushkin, have biographical importance but do not all that frequently rise above the level of any wife to any husband ...”

“... to borrow his typically ornate term – from Robert Craft’s diary of his years with Stravinsky first appeared in the famous series of their conversation books issued throughout the Sixties. In 1972, after the composer’s death, a far bigger selection was published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a ...”

“... do a spot of postcoital dusting. One who did lend a hand, though very much not a bit of fluff, was Vera Stravinsky. Chester’s working surfaces included the bathroom floor, and paying a call of nature, Mrs Stravinsky spotted what she took to be a bowl of dirty water standing there. In a forlorn attempt to give the ...”

“... At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of 20th-century musical thought and imagery’. There couldn’t be a richer subject for a musical biographer and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject ...”

“... wrote, and he seemed to be allergic to cleanliness too. In a forlorn attempt to tidy his flat, Vera Stravinsky once emptied out what she took to be a bowl of dirty water on his bathroom floor; it was in fact a chocolate pudding, made in the same basin into which Auden often pissed. Alan Bennett’s question (in the LRB of 23 May 1985) seems ...”

“... widely (and rigorously) read than I am, had come across the phrase in the correspondence between Stravinsky and Jacques Maritain in the 1920s, making him think it came from St Thomas Aquinas. Since Flannery O’Connor was nothing if not Catholic that might be the link. I tell John Bird the story of Dudley Moore and me seeing ...”

“... Ernest Beaux in 1920-21, is that – in keeping with Chanel’s friendships with Diaghilev and Stravinsky – it was the first abstract perfume: it smelled like nothing else. Chanel No. 5 was not the first compound perfume. Jicky by Guerlain – with notes of lavender, civet, vanilla and herbs – has been in continuous production since 1889. But Chanel ...”

“... to Borodin’s frantic tribal rhythms in the Polovtsian folk dances. She even took the lead in Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu (though one journalist thought her less a flaming phoenix than a delicate hummingbird). Tiny, fast and feather light, with a leap almost as high as Nijinsky’s, at 18 she was the latest sensation of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev ...”

“... hours of music, which include Shostakovich (playing as well as being performed), Prokofiev and Stravinsky, with performers like Gilels, Richter and Rostropovich. Del claimed the archive was worth as much as $9 billion – a huge exaggeration. But its value is great and the deal is being protested by Nikolai Petrov and the Ministry of Culture, among ...”