“... some purpose, Willy told us the whole story of his life so that we should realise that he rose from the ranks, and so far has made no money, so isn’t marriageable. This made clear, he can let himself go and is having great fun. I believe that he has more character than appears.” ’ The whole truth is unlikely to have been told about Willy’s ...”

“... to play them. From this small start, a Bohemian school of horn-playing burgeoned. As Sporck rose in the world, he advanced the cause of music in Bohemia, importing an opera company from Vienna and building up a horn ensemble of legendary powers. Bohemian players became so skilful that they travelled to France, not to learn, but to play. German makers ...”

“... to fix an order upon it. The Duke’s vision is fancier:        And there In tiers of rose and grey will rise A wedding of Greece and China From which the landscape seems to fall As stair by stair turns round … But even the conscious muddle of tenses cannot disguise the inevitable futureness of the project. The transcendent work of art must ...”

“... to challenge the sentimental and moralistic pictures of working-class community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy and hospitable but lonely, introverted and largely joyless. Her mother, a Lancashire weaver’s daughter, had fought against ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge ...”

“... denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own interpretations. In Norris’s ...”

“... there are poems that combine curses, doomed love, the sea and the elegy, such as ‘The Death of Richard Wagner’, whose penultimate stanza describes the effect of hearing his music: As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of ...”

“... like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the 1890s the same transition was held to have ‘sullied’ his poetic inspiration and ‘buried’ it in ‘the dust ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”

“... on at least one military recruitment broadside during the Napoleonic Wars, but they are spoken by Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son over the usurping John’s poisoned corpse. Even without the undercutting produced by a knowledge of its dramatic context, the play’s final couplet contains a big ‘if’: ‘Naught shall make us rue/If England to ...”

“... emperor and empress live.A day in the life of Akihito and Michiko began at 6.30 a.m., when they rose, watched the television news, then walked around one of the gardens in the Imperial Palace. The old palace buildings were destroyed by the American bombs, and the current buildings date from the late 1960s: smart and dignified, like their occupants, but far ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... but Stendhal would probably have changed that. He considered another, worse possibility: The Rose of the North. ‘A flat and pretentious title,’ he ruefully commented, ‘which seemed fine to me yesterday.’ The work was written in 1837, after Stendhal had abandoned Lucien Leuwen, before he found La Chartreuse. It offers us some hundred pages of the ...”

“... a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their ...”

“... the year 1189. It was paid for, we now know, by William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of slow-grown timber for the reinforcement inside: no ...”