“... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... are nowhere near as comfortable as GNER. I’ve never had much time for the spurious populism of Richard Branson: his jolly japes and toothy demeanour can’t disguise the fact that he is a hard-faced entrepreneur. These thoughts recur when we come back from Glasgow the next day and have to travel by bus two-thirds of the way (‘track repairs’) and with a ...”

“... and poetically; travelled in the realms not only of Kavanagh and Hughes, but of Olson and Williams, Snyder and Bly. I was freed up,’ he says, much as Donald Davie was freed up by his own move to California. (Heaney praises Essex Poems, begun before Davie left Britain, but published, and perhaps completed, afterwards.) To live in America meant ...”

“... modernity and ‘planning’, to which Bevan was deeply committed. It is galling that the Bevanite Richard Crossman would become such a parsimonious housing minister under Wilson, cutting costs and driving down standards through his adoption of system-built housing, the disastrous results of which were subsequently used to discredit the entire notion of ...”

“... and commodity culture in the 20th century, Leavis intrigued the political left in Britain. Raymond Williams was a one-time follower, attracted by Leavis’s antagonisms: to London literary culture, to the press, to advertising. Hilliard is particularly good on the influence of Leavis on Richard Hoggart, even studying the ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... equal inclusion within imperial frameworks before rejecting them altogether. The Jamaican James Williams, a former slave, used imperial justice against the repressive ‘apprentice’ system that persisted after the abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic prosperity ...”

“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... people!’ The usual suspects, or most of them, were on board – Stevens, Eliot, Crane, Pound, Williams, there was even a poem of Lowell’s – but not with their standard anthology pieces. About 80 per cent of Thom’s choices either had Eros in the title or were directly concerned with the troublesome deity. Nearly half the poets in the collection were ...”

“... life. He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have led his protégé ‘into ...”

“... ever have those dreams that are just completely real?’ In the opening scene of Slacker (1990), Richard Linklater, who also directs the film, plays a version of himself, peppering his monologue on the nature of reality with references to Tolstoy, Frank Zappa and The Wizard of Oz. The movie takes place over a single day in Austin and follows a string of ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... between the orchestra and the conductor, Hans von Bülow, grew strained: Franz Strauss, father of Richard and the brilliant first horn of the Munich orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his wife’s Isolde, caught a chill on stage and subsequently ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”