“... ministers could offer Foucauldian observers a field-day on the workings of surveillance. Richard Alston, Minister for Communications and the Arts, hounds the ABC for alleged bias – his Jesuit training shows. (Governments never seem to worry about the biases of Kerry Packer’s Channel 9, to take one example.) The funding cuts all but demolished ...”

“... minority sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a few months ago reviving the claim that the young William Shakespeare can be identified with the actor William Shakeshafte who is named in the will of one of Edmund Campion’s Lancashire Catholic ...”

“... could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the wretched Richard Gott recently managed, on a smaller scale, to do), waited until 1982 to publish his book After Long Silence. It told the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf who ...”

“... seemed to be reflected in the angry disarray of contemporary Irish political opinion. Yeats may have wished to avoid conflict with the out-and-out separatists, and to preserve literature from politics, but it turned out that this could not be done, at least by him. He wanted self-government for Ireland, but was sure that more than that was needed if the ...”

“... had written a charming letter to Aleksander. ‘As far as I know,’ says Bodman Rae, ‘they may have corresponded occasionally until the architect’s death.’Back in Paris, Messiaen resumed his weekly duties at the Church of La Sainte Trinité: 10 o’clock High Mass – accompanied plain-chant only; 11 o’clock Mass – Frescobaldi, Bach or romantic ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... in 1972, assuring her an attentive hearing from Japan’s huge neighbour. Deeper calculations may have been behind her appointment, however. She was prepared to describe the Foreign Ministry, long believed to be without fault, as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. Japan’s ultra-secretive spook outfit, the Cabinet Research Office, is funded by off-budget ...”

“... over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked with apocalypse, the end of the world, and the messianic fanatics who seek to bring it about. And so although ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Gold (the first of a three-volume study to be entitled Bolshevism and the British Left), which may also be read with profit by those interested in current debates about the funding of the Labour Party. In some respects the British CP, whose claim to historic significance is modest, was similar to other CPs. Its members were overwhelmingly drawn from the ...”

“... 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 banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

“... the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.)Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for ...”

“... company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting that they might do better to walk along the platform to the restaurant car. Jeffrey Archer ...”

“... juxtaposed with a sailing boat as a roaring locomotive is to a stagecoach. Progress. The Titanic may not have been as technically innovative as Brunel’s Great Western, the first transatlantic steamer, had been in 1838: her two state of the art engines generated what was then an astonishing 750 horsepower. Titanic’s two more conventional engines each ...”

“... Legend decisively discredits that narrative with abundant evidence and convincing argument. This may come as a surprise to anyone who knows Boot’s ideological inclinations. For several decades he has been a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting ‘the savage wars of ...”