“... 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 ...”

“... In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually ...”

“... conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may (or he may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas ...”

“... room he had an absent look, staring into space and not uttering a word. Twelve years earlier, in May 1909, Bronia Nijinska had watched her brother wow the audiences of Paris, dancing the role of Armida’s favourite slave in Le Pavillon d’Armide during the first season of the Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev: ‘While he is still up in the air a rumble ...”

“... without emotion. This feeling, while it shall endure, and pervade the bulk of our population, may be held as a proof that loyalty, and the love of justice, and hatred of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old ...”

“... of the age imposed a precise geometric order on the pastoral scene.’ New as the geometric order may be, chasing after hares is as old as any ancient rite, but who or what is hunting the hare in Turner’s painting? Is it just a train, and how familiar, really, is that location? You can shut down the iconographical interpretation of art, with its artistic ...”

“... be confined to university departments of literature. This desire to ‘keep philosophy pure’ (in Richard Rorty’s phrase) has more to do with professional self-esteem than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of ...”

“... of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although ...”

“... a ball into a net. What is a ‘fair’ advantage? Being confident and being able to speak clearly may be helpful qualifications for a barrister who has to lead in a crowded court, but we have to ask where these capacities come from, who is likely to have them, and so on. These are all familiar arguments, or at least they were. I’m rehearsing them here only ...”

“... been rising out of my past to express surprise that I ever should have amounted to anything. You may not believe it but I am going to have to thank one fellow for remembering the days of ’81 when we went to kindergarten together and once cut up a snake into very small pieces to see if contrary to the known laws of nature we couldn’t make it stop ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... mountains of glossy Australiana now on offer – the bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... conceded later that there was something ‘morally repugnant’ about this – some of his reports may have affected his targets’ careers – but also said that ‘somebody has to clean the drains’: he thought what he did was ‘necessary’ while the Soviet Union remained a threat. He bolted from Oxford – this time to marry his long-term girlfriend, Ann ...”

“... from the Field (2017), the former director of Iranian affairs at the National Security Council, Richard Nephew, described the sanctions as based on ‘objectives for the imposition of pain’, accompanied by instructions for ‘the conditions necessary for the removal of pain’. It’s the torturer’s schema, taken straight from the war on terror ...”