“... are, in Hardy’s phrase, ‘selves unseeing’. Setting the poem eighty years after Schubert, Richard Strauss overrode these delicacies of sentiment in favour of an outpouring of ecstatic love (the young man’s), pulsing with sensuality and the rush of the blood. His setting – Fragonard to Schubert’s Watteau – scaled up the expressive range to the ...”

“... Hispanic echoes were, as it happened, everywhere in Moscow in those days. Resistance broadsheets read No pasaran; graffiti denounced the khunta; citizens demanded of armoured units if they were prepared to re-enact Chile. Popular celebrations and revolutionary images were in place. But the nature of the overturn in August is only partly suggested by ...”

“... he merely fails to develop a critical idiom consistently different from his poetry. His refusal to read any criticism of his own writings, which Leppmann likens to his refusal to have himself psychoanalysed, is not to be seen as a categorical rejection of all rational-analytical procedures, but as a sign of his determination to choose for himself the ...”

“... depends on a successful resolution of two sets of questions. The first seems to be formulated by Richard Titmuss in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Titmuss draws a distinction between Britain, where all fresh blood donation was voluntary, a gift to the community and hence an expression of concern with the general good; and the ...”

“... written for medical journals in a subsequent attempt to figure out her condition. In 1978, Richard Altick put together the pieces of her story in The Shows of London. Until very recently (as far as I could tell), Altick was the only person outside the medical profession who had written about her this century. Now Jan Bondeson, whose paper on her ...”

“... war plan for Korea (‘Operations Plan 5030’). The strategy, according to insiders who have read the plan, is ‘to topple Kim’s regime by destabilising its military forces’, who would then overthrow him and bring about a ‘regime change’. The plan was pushed, according to an article in US News and World Report, ‘by many of the same ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... was to go to America to work with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ...”

“... for teenagers. Trump’s description of the novel reveals no evidence that he has actually read it, but his identification with Roark is consistent with Rand’s exaltation of egoism.Trump’s self-promotional grandiosity has prompted endless comparisons to P.T. Barnum, the showman and circus operator of the 19th century who was the son of a ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... or to this particular one, or the absence of virtue tout court, supposed to take? It’s enough to read poetry from time to time to reckon the material character of language, and to know that meaning is fugitive; a reader with a politicised sense of the page might even agree that it is the business of poetry to insist on the migratory character of meaning. Yet ...”