“... and there are few if any equivalents in his output to Schumann’s ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’, Strauss’s ‘Zueignung’ or Berg’s ‘Die Nachtigall’.In the history of musical melancholy, a special place is reserved for Schubert. If Bach’s music embraces the wretchedness of the human condition (‘Ich elender Mensch’) it does so within ...”

“... for this largesse PR apparently restrained itself and said nothing about big corporations. Later Allen Dulles (CIA chief and brother of the more famous John Foster) kept the magazine afloat, and even got it tax-exempt status. And as the tide changed in the Reagan period, Phillips, perpetually in command, changed accordingly. As Sidney Hook said of his ...”

“... Men. But their tenure was in jeopardy, because the owner of the land on which it stood, Giles Allen, was refusing to extend their lease, which was due to expire in April 1597. It was this imminent threat of eviction which brought Burbage to the Blackfriars in search of alternative accommodation for the company. He paid the owner of the former ...”

“... of Philby’s funeral in Moscow:In London, Philby’s old comrade from the days of War Station XB, Nicholas Elliott, was in his club at St James’s at about this time, giving thought to a scheme to disrupt any attempt by the KGB leadership to iconise Philby posthumously, as indeed was their intention. The idea that formed in Elliott’s mind was that the ...”

“... she arrived at the Royal College of Art the following year, it was ‘the place’, as the artist Allen Jones put it. The principal, Robin Darwin, hadn’t just brought it back from postwar torpor, he had reconnected it with industry and architecture. Windows for Coventry, designed by the RCA’s head of glass, Lawrence Lee, and his former students Keith New ...”

“... Prynne, Barry MacSweeney, Wendy Mulford, John James, with decent selections of Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver. And glimpses of many others, the reforgotten: John Temple, Anna Mendelssohn. It is a truth, unilaterally acknowledged (Cambridge and environs), that Raworth is the man, the only English poet the Americans read. They like, or liked in ...”

“... very good indeed. In The Kodak Mantra Diaries, Sinclair’s record of a film project based on Allen Ginsberg’s stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described ...”

“... on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western ...”

“... Stendhal’s. Along the way, he could be as astringent about such a venerated totem as Flaubert as Nicholas Jenkins is about Trollope: monotonous predictability of plot and characterisation; Bel Ami vastly superior to L’Education sentimentale; a touch of the mountebank. In the 20th century, he pioneered admiration for Svevo in England, and was first off the ...”

“... management do give us more time to suffer the pains and debilities of old age but, as Woody Allen noted, consider the alternative. Still, Porter is on to something important here and the tension between his two narratives – the Exodus narrative of liberation from ignorance and disease, the other its ironic doppelgänger – suffuses his book. The ...”

“... on the bandwagon. But the press ignored this. ‘The story was in the bag before I even spoke,’ Nicholas Holgate, Kensington and Chelsea Council’s town clerk, told me. ‘As a civil servant for 24 years and a local government officer for eight and a half years I was trained to be impartial, objective and evidence-driven. None of that was evident in the ...”