“... Marxist émigré – as Lukacs was when they met – into an elegantly dressed ‘half-Jewish pupil of the Jesuits with crass views’ is a matter to be primarily related to Mann’s novel rather than to the substantial character of his supposed model. This kind of deflection merely delays the necessary encounter with the central problems of Lukacs’s ...”

“... ripping the dedication of the Eroica to Napoleon.’ But the plain reader, the disobedient pupil, thinks that perhaps it is just old Enderby letting rip, not Beethoven at all. PFFFRRRRUMMMP! In Napoleon Symphony, Burgess tells us, ‘INRI’ means not only that Latin acronym tattooed on British soldiers’ arms – Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews ...”

“... he was taking a trip with his wife she sent him an email containing a story that, she claimed, a former member of the creative writing class called Elaine had sent her about an American woman who seduces an Arab man. Nasreen believed, or said she believed, that the story was a veiled account of a real affair between Elaine and Lasdun: ‘In effect Nasreen ...”

“... the queen and Princess Diana). Junor, however, is a career journalist, daughter of John Junor, the former editor in chief of the Sunday Express, and she is much closer to her material. She has written two lives of Charles and one each of Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, as well as a group portrait of ‘the troubled life of the House of Windsor’. A ...”

“... to see – that it is she who wants him, while his primary attentions are directed to a Maori pupil who bears him twins which die at birth. It is this illegal love affair and its imminent consequences, and not, as Anna imagines, his relationship with her, that seem to lead to his suicide – an event rendered with a curious comic gusto which I suspect ...”

“... and the boring meeting’, but Healey had, for forty years, spent taxing days drafting the former and weary evenings attending the latter. It was the struggle to which he had devoted himself: a struggle for the advancement of his own ideas, of his own party and, inevitably, of his own position as the means of achieving the rest. Readers of The Time of ...”

“... in the north-east of Scotland, to the unmarried Anne Ramsay, who worked as a maid, MacDonald was a pupil-teacher at the local parish school before departing for England at the age of eighteen. An initial move to Bristol in 1885 misfired, but the following year MacDonald settled permanently in London. He joined the putatively Marxist Social Democratic ...”

“... in the law, to bridge those last hundred-odd years. The senior clerk in the chambers where I was a pupil in the 1960s had started work towards 1890 as a boy in the Temple, where he had been trained to write copperplate with the steel-nibbed pen that he would still use to copy out pleadings and opinions for signature when the typist was away. My head of ...”

“... make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master and pupil, both in musculature and in technique, that Hemingway could without difficulty refrain from doing his opponent any damage. Lewis, he felt sure, wanted to see Pound hurt. He was careful not to oblige. ‘I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me ...”

“... Royal Festival Hall’s interiors, was introduced to Greenwich and Blackheath after the war by a pupil, the architect and local resident Trevor Dannatt. Moro was so impressed that he moved to a house of his own design in the secluded Blackheath Park. ‘I went to Greenwich and I was absolutely charmed by it,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, what a wonderful ...”

“... come in many forms that are often hard to spot ahead of one’s rivals. Nevertheless, Ikeda, a former financial bureaucrat, saw open frontiers beckoning to Japan from all points of the social and political compass when he announced his income-doubling scheme in 1960, by which year Japan had moved from the ravages of its own futile wars to the sunlit ...”

“... and complained about having to say grace before meals – not at all the habit of an irreligious former choirboy. He was ready for something new, and when a fresh wave of American composers, influenced by John Cage, arrived at the annual Darmstadt summer school to sample the European experience – and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the ...”

“... that her clearing of an apartment between the walls of her house has revealed layer after layer of former inhabitants, and brought to light a ‘bright green lawn under thunderous and glaring clouds and on the lawn, a giant black egg of pockmarked iron, but polished and glassy around which, and reflected in the black shine, stood Emily, Hugo, Gerald, her ...”

“... and what a difference a few years has made. Cage is now 27 and has left behind any of his former regard for European classicalism. He asks Thomson if he might be interested in writing something for percussion and reports with pride that his group already performs works by key experimental composers such as Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer and Lou ...”

“... is, however, all too simple: it was the fault of Lawrence’s awful mother. Her claim to be a former teacher from a genteel background was a fraud: she tormented her bluff and genial working-class husband, and forced her children to hate him; she was rightly ostracised by her neighbours for her disdainful self-righteousness; she ‘cruelly ...”