“... from anyone’s received idea of a poet. He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious ...”

“... to write and produce rousing pageants: Fun to Be Free, written with his frequent Hollywood partner Charles MacArthur, drew large audiences to Madison Square Garden shortly before Pearl Harbor, and starred Jack Benny, Betty Grable, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who tap-danced on Hitler’s coffin. Hecht also wrote propagandist ...”

“... devices for the vertical transport of goods, primarily, but also of people. The English diplomat Charles Greville, writing in 1830, recalled with admiration a lift in the Genoese palace of the Sardinian royal couple: ‘For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it ...”

“... to sexual pleasure, especially his emphasis on the idea that women can enjoy sex, seemed unusually frank and modern; later on changing sexual mores overtook him, and lines about heroes ‘enjoying’ women ‘in the fullest sense’ or ‘storming the gates of paradise’ came to seem creaky.) The depiction early in the novel of a grey Stalinist Moscow riddled ...”

“... against Spain. Languet, who was then 54, had been sent by the Elector of Saxony to congratulate Charles IX on the peace of Saint-Germain, which, in granting concessions to the Huguenots, marked a brief pause in the French wars of religion. Protestant hopes in Europe rode high, but by August of that year were dashed by the events of St Bartholomew’s ...”

“... The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view by ending with the massacre of Kanpur, and the death of all the protagonists. Unsurprisingly, later novels would conclude on a brighter, triumphant note, making Kanpur less like the charge of the Light Brigade and more like the Alamo ...”

“... at his memorial service. ‘So many of us felt that was his destiny.’ He himself was engagingly frank in discounting this scenario, saying that ‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’ Certainly, he never looked back with any wistfulness, still less envy, on the way that this possibility was foreclosed by the spectacular rise ...”

“... house for the avant-garde’ (at www.ubu.com). Slonimsky’s world-premiere recordings of Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse are catalogued on the website under ‘Sound’, but he’s also in the ‘Outsiders’ section, with other novelties and curios, such as Louis Farrakhan’s unexpectedly chirpy calypso songs. UbuWeb is a place where the cerebral ...”

“... R. Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art) opened in 1939 and was given new prominence in 1959 by Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous building. Then came the Hirshhorn in Washington DC in 1974. Across the Mall, the National Gallery of Art was watching and I.M. Pei was commissioned to create the East Building, which opened in 1978. The East Building was not at ...”

“... Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the excitements of the ...”

“... of concerts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, then run by another cultivated Brit, Sir Charles Moses. Goossens found an ‘immense spirit and enthusiasm’ for the musical arts, but nowhere to satisfy them beyond Sydney Town Hall, a wedding-cake confection in Second Empire style with fuzzy acoustics, seating at best 2500. Like many ...”

“... is about. The salvationist strand to design on the Underground is nothing new. It goes back to Frank Pick, the Yorkshire puritan and businessman who imposed modern aesthetics and a measure of uniformity on the maze of private lines brought together in 1933 as London Transport. Pick also did a great deal of straightforward management, but his name is always ...”

“... never resolve the uncertainty, which can leave the thrust of their essays a little obscure: both Frank Hahn and Partha Dasgupta, for instance, argue that utilitarianism is compatible with respect for individual rights, Hahn because of the utility which people derive from the fulfilment of their rights and Dasgupta (more persuasively, perhaps) because of ...”

“... to death and resurrection in the novelist’s work. Coincidentally, in 1982, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist was published. Dickens was the subject of Garrett Stewart’s previous book, and is the main author discussed in Death Sentences. But his line is different from Sanders’s, who locates the Dickensian ambivalence about death in ...”

“... on two antitheses which he does not appear to recognise: the contrast between Belfast and what Frank Wright calls the ‘unreformable’ decaying border areas, and between Ulster as the last representative of a British tradition and the rest of Britain which has, in the eyes of very many Protestants, betrayed it. The Ulster state was never a monolithic ...”