“... of his own gaucheries and existential contingencies, other people’s table-talk or Stravinsky’s English (as controversially recorded in the conversation books). But he is still left with an alter ego he would quite like to murder. That need not worry us, however. Our problem is only to accept the exaggerations and selective detail of a style based teasingly ...”

“... gifts with Bach’s great keyboard masterpieces – the Partitas, Toccatas, French and English Suites, Inventions, both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, most of the Art of Fugue – became almost the core of the repertoire. Brendel, Pollini, Barenboim and Martha Ageriach were consolidating their presence at the same time but none of them had a ...”

“... which preceded it. It is no accident that millenarians who, like the Fifth Monarchy Men of the English Revolution, identify themselves with this kingdom are rarely supporters of established social traditions. Because he gives a description of the social and psychological changes that effect the degeneration of the metals and which culminate in the rule of ...”

“... and whose formative influence he sought early on to minimise. Walsh admits his dependence on Richard Taruskin’s ‘monumental’ Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, whose painstaking researches into Stravinsky’s early life and his relations with the Rimsky-Korsakov circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white ...”

“... But her very existence, in its unapologetic vitality, was enough to provoke. The graphic designer Richard Hollis, a contemporary at Wimbledon, found her ‘over-lush, you could say. I don’t know if you’d call it pushy.’ Of her work he says: ‘It’s direct, energetic, and I think that’s how she was … Her work looks quite confident, which is what ...”

“... with fast trains in the hope of giving life to a trans-Pennine megalopolis, a kind of northern English Rhine-Ruhr. The problem, for some, is that the short sweep of track carrying the new Chord over the River Irwell will cut off railway access to the world’s oldest station, the original Manchester terminus of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in ...”

“... are seldom of much help in correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a ...”

“... family and friends, we are told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with such difficulties and such good fortune, Sutherland has coped very ...”

“... than 70 per cent of the population was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite could read English. In October 1968, during lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years of dictatorship as a ‘decade of development’, students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had spread across the country. The ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... one: the ‘international’ theme was on hold and he had become embedded in a new way in the English capital, with an interest in what might be called the price of political idealism. He composed the essay after a brief holiday in France, where he met several old literary confrères – Daudet, Goncourt and Zola. Their discussions appear to have gripped ...”

“... faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard ...”

“... even for him to master completely and fruitfully: one of the most absorbingly intelligent men in English letters, he was almost unable to write, or at least to finish, a readable book, and became an alluring but dangerous generator of unfinished theses about his unfinished poems. There are, it has to be said, first-rate scholars and critics at work on ...”

“... and her unstoppable banging on about the beauties of Oz. Hornung evokes the chilliness of the English upper classes with a frisson that suggests he must himself have been on the receiving end. Even her name is unspeakable, Gladys, the shortening to Gladdie worse still. The embarrassment reaches a peak when they go riding in Rotten Row and, in the presence ...”