“... on England. Deschooling and little red books are everywhere. Peter has taken up with a ‘a folk singer woman’. Her mother (‘Mumma’) conveys the bad news, stressing each terrible item of offence: ‘vegan food ... macrobiotic ... hippy ... R.D. Laing ... Joan Baez ... probably on pot’. ‘Is he living with her?’ an appalled Anthea asks ...”

“... Baghdadi-Jewish dynasty, who fled the political machinations of his hometown for British India; Joseph Evzel Gunzburg (1812-78), an alcohol magnate from Podolia with a prestigious rabbinic genealogy stretching back fifteen generations; Solomon Poliakov (1812-97), a shtetl Jew who set out from Belarus for Moscow, leaving his wife, Zlata, to mind the ...”

“... shot. At the beginning of The Age of Innocence (1993) the camera zooms slowly in to the face of a singer on stage at the opera. We see wrinkles, make-up, the line on the forehead where the wig begins. All very realistic, even real, but in reality only a person hanging from the ceiling like a spider could see what we are seeing on the screen. At such moments ...”

“... a reasonably good job of evoking the young Evita, the kid who runs off with a lugubrious tango singer (played by Jimmy Nail as if the mourning had started already), and takes on the big city. Madonna has all the bounce that is needed, and manages to combine an effect of ruthlessness with an effect of vulnerability. Throughout the movie, she makes you ...”

“... or abroad. Poets liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography ...”

“... of Desnos’s involvement in the Surrealist group, and his hopeless love for Yvonne George, a singer of sea shanties at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. The history of its refinding, rewriting, translation in a slightly different version after it was published in Czech by Joseph Stuna – a student who found Desnos in the ...”

“... that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long time, however, his work provoked ...”

“... death in 1927, at the age of 50. In those days film was in its infancy and still silent (The Jazz Singer was released the year Duncan died). Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she did, Duncan couldn’t imagine dancing on film without it. But more than that, the absence of ...”

“... and expected much from us, one of the first questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first ...”

“... that this ‘dry membrane coloured like a soap bubble’ actually dampens the sound. In Provence a singer out of breath or a poet without inspiration is said to have broken mirrors. In ‘Reading Montale’, an essay appended to his translation of the poet’s first three books, Jonathan Galassi considers the old and especially Mediterranean association of ...”

“... escape him). First of all, one is named Franz, for a reason obviously well-known to Kafka, though Joseph [sic] of course is unaware of it (by a supreme irony, their names taken together add up to Franz Josef [sic], the name of the aged Emperor whom the Jews of the Dual Monarchy revered).’ When the reading of a text is given such licence of association and ...”

“... red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length with a giant collar, but Dr Pozzi easily ...”

“... became an aristocratic status symbol. As late as 1772, the distinguished naturalist Sir Joseph Banks fell out, preposterously, with Captain Cook because Cook would not let him take an entourage which included two french-horn players to the South Seas on board the good ship Resoultion. (Banks and his musicians went to Iceland instead.) Exotic and a ...”

“... and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, influencing ...”

“... 17 August). McEwen was respectful of the tradition of flower painting epitomised by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, on whom he wrote an undergraduate thesis, but the exhibition’s suggestion that McEwen was ‘the Redouté of our time’ is somewhat misleading. His work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious desire ...”