“... was likely to spread. But it was too late to draw back easily; and in the end Prokofiev decided to read the situation in a positive light: Shostakovich might be a ‘formalist’, but he, evidently, was not; why else would the Soviets be wooing him? ‘In the months ahead,’ Morrison writes, ‘Prokofiev allowed himself to believe that, with Shostakovich ...”

“... rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became known not just as ...”

“... retired now but that’s what I was doing when I started writing this: I wrote and I waited to get Peter’s dinner out of the oven. Peter got 24-hour care, and I did three seven-hour shifts a week. I enjoyed the connectedness that working always gave me, the benchmarks at the end of every shift: pill box empty, kitchen ...”

“... the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture ...”

“... It was, Swartz and his friends wrote, ‘outrageous and unacceptable’ to make scientists pay to read the work of their colleagues, and disgraceful that students at elite universities have access to knowledge while those in the developing world have nothing. ‘We need to take information,’ they wrote, ‘wherever it is stored, make our copies and share ...”

“... more than a cosmetic choice. Displaying all the insouciant condescension of a Walpolean oligarch, Peter Mandelson mused that ‘the era of pure representative democracy is coming slowly to an end.’ Each party adopted the same techniques. If they were aware that they were making the political class look alien, uncaring and fake, there was no electoral ...”

“... is an authority on obscenity in Old Comedy – his book The Maculate Muse (1975) is a must-read in the field – and his versions include multiple instances of ‘pussy’ and ‘cock’; Poochigian mostly prefers ‘dick’ and ‘twat’. Though the Spartan Messenger in Lysistrata – whose dialect he translates into what he calls a ‘country twang ...”

“... to bless or to damn a writer whose ‘inextinguishability’ will ensure that he continues to be read long after detractors and zealots alike have fallen silent. The organ which is the subject of this offbeat biography belonged in the first instance to Blair, even if its subsequent fame owes rather a lot to Orwell. Blair, it would appear, ‘was born with a ...”

“... in Europe: they have been virtually eliminated, according to Mitford, in the United States. Peter Chamberlen, a Huguenot barber-surgeon whose family settled in London, invented the forceps in 1588. The family kept it a secret for over a hundred years, travelling about to attend the births of those wealthy enough to pay for their ministrations. Not only ...”

“... of climatic irregularities – acid rain, the Milankovitch theory, negative feedback loops – read like so many Gothic shockers. Texts as grim as Aids philippics present themselves as cures for cancer. They raise spectres of hope in places where hope cannot live. The age demands its technical primers, its books of instruction. We must prepare ourselves ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... For that reason, only experimental solutions [Adorno means productions, but he could be read as proposing also the need for experimental, i.e. self-conscious and ironic and non-literal, interpretations] are justified today; only what injures the Wagner orthodoxy is true. The defenders of the grail shouldn’t get so worked up about it; Wagner’s ...”

“... Germany – an action predicated on German defeat and thus treasonable. According to Owings, who read the transcripts of their meetings, to vote in this new state one would have had to be 27 and male. Freya von Moltke believes this is a mistake: ‘I know my husband didn’t think that way.’ Whatever the truth, middle-class resistance groups were often ...”

“... in the Sixties – which he does with considerable confidence and resource. But when the book is read, one does not feel that a synoptic view of a century’s artistic activity has been recorded: the Lamberts were, after all, marginal figures – over-talented de-spoilers of their own talent. Their achievements look smaller with the lapse of time, and if it ...”

“... Tsvetaeva are none the less very different kinds of poet. It would be possible, even desirable, to read and reread Akhmatova’s complex masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, in a state of complete ignorance about the poet herself, although the poem is full of cryptic intimacies and references to friends and events, both public and private. But Tsvetaeva’s ...”