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“... it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became ...”

“... him.’ From Salieri’s point of view, Les Danaïdes was an unqualified success. On the title-page of the score, printed in Paris shortly after the first performance, Salieri’s name stands alone. Its prominent dedicatory letter, addressed to the Emperor’s sister, Marie Antoinette, ingeniously plays out a further trope on the ‘sous la dictée de ...”

“... that its title song (sung by Remick) is his ‘personal statement’. This makes for a nervous page in the book, discussing the lyric that concludes: What’s hard is simple, What’s natural comes hard. Maybe you could show me How to let go, Lower my guard, Learn to be free. Maybe if you whistle, Whistle for me. ‘To believe that “Anyone Can ...”

“... form, class background, internal audience, degree of famousness, external audience, media ecology, page layout, news events, readerly predilection and timing. Many of his poems return to the feedback loops between sincere emotion and its preconditions. In ‘A Private Bottling’, a boozer spends the night drinking his way through different whiskies, lovingly ...”

“... it is effectively a colony. The locals have had their town bought up around them. On the first page 15-year-old Silas is described as having a job ‘yanking weeds from flowerbeds and patios for rich New Yorkers’. He’s not an exemplary employee, as he is stoned most of the time, but that’s not the point. As Edith the florist puts it, ‘the ...”

“... more children in quick succession, he kept on writing and performing, finished the eight-hundred page manuscript of his autobiographical novel, Seeds of Man, moved to California, met another woman, divorced Marjorie, married again, divorced again, and then the dreaded Huntington’s caught up with him. He didn’t die until 1967, but the 1950s and 1960s were ...”

“... Bletchley Park to enable the British to regain the upper hand in the cryptographic struggle is not Alan Turing, however, but a neurotic Cambridge mathematician who fancies girls: Tom Jericho’s heart has been broken by a cruel, icy blonde who has mysteriously gone missing from Bletchley. Investigating her disappearance, Jericho also finds time to solve the ...”

“... comprehensive study rather poses the question of whether there is anything left to say. ‘Alan Taylor has been the subject of two good biographies,’ Chris Wrigley writes in his preface. ‘Perhaps, in the centenary year of his birth, there is room for a third.’ Perhaps. But whatever commemorations and retrospectives 2006 brought, the rediscovery ...”

“... seething at a ‘diversity’ ethos that they perceive as lowering standards. A recent front-page article in the New York Times referred to Gay’s ‘tepid response to antisemitism on campus’ and her ‘disastrous’ congressional testimony. This is now the received version of her performance – an assessment which, if accurate, might well seem to ...”

“... more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to hang on to the timeline of Russell’s steep developmental itinerary. Some of this blurriness is characteristic of the man, but some is the ...”

“... of his death at the age of 11 in 1596. Graham Holderness rises to this challenge with an eight-page meditation centred on the echo of ‘Hamnet’ in ‘Hamlet’: the names have no etymological link, but one senses their emotional assonance, to which the old theatrical tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical ...”

“... heating system.) Nothing but the Night, by contrast, is insistently vague. It opens with a seven-page dream sequence, and it’s filled with descriptions that resemble ambitious stage directions: ‘His face was a twisted mask where incommunicable pity and hate struggled vainly with contempt and unacknowledged love.’ Maxley’s trauma serves as a licence ...”

“... After that, he is barely mentioned, until he reappears on the very last page (page 715) of the book. Ana Ozores, a bored wife, torn between the desires of the flesh and the desire for religious meaning, has fainted in the cathedral after a final confrontation with her hulkingly sexy ...”