“... could easily have been withdrawn. Why should Lebedinsky invent such a far-fetched tale if not to lay claim to a special intimacy with the tormented genius? The same wish seems also to underlie his account of Shostakovich’s becoming a Party member in 1960. Lebedinsky portrays himself as the composer’s confidant and conscience, warning him that ...”

“... disastrous Comet crashes, and decided to veto the planned V1000 jet on the grounds that the future lay with turbo-props, not jets. This meant that when the Boeing 707s appeared there was no British competitor, and when BOAC begged that Rolls-Royce engines at least be used in the Boeings, Maudling dismissed this obviously sensible (and ultimately ...”

“... But his, like Plutarch’s after him, was a lone voice. A huge industry of hunters and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North Africa, tigers and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally ...”

“... performance of Schoenberg’s music. Kokoschka wrote for the theatre. According to the playwright Paul Kornfeld, ‘a drama by Kokoschka is only a variation on his pictures and vice versa. Tone and melody, rhythm and gesture in his words are paralleled by the same effects in his pictures.’ Drama and spectacle, the arts as one, life as full-bodied ...”

“... in the Austrian Alps. His methods were in keeping with his approach to philosophy: he did not lay claim to any special authority and instead of expounding facts and theories he asked his pupils questions and left them to work out the answers for themselves. When Hermine happened to see him at work she marvelled at his capacity to hold their ...”

“... of sharp flowers. Or had I a responsibility to/Speak to society: though how could it hear me? It lay in its hotels.The toad persists through a martial German phase, a Keatsian cemetery-haunting phase, a ‘song of my sociologised self’ (‘Long angry flounce, tuned to piping self-sorrow … Suddenly charmed by community’) until she abandons the ...”

“... afford to buy their works.Sickert’s and Clark’s belief that the health of art in their time lay in modest private patronage was a tacit admission that opportunities for painting’s equivalent of the big production number – altarpieces, history paintings, group portraits in council chambers – were either unavailable or compromised. Even in ...”

“... for his own good or our pleasure but to be fully invested in realism as Jameson understands it. Paul de Man once said that Georg Lukács wrote about the novel as if he was the novel. Jameson doesn’t do that, but he does write about the novel in terms of a long-standing intimacy with the form, as if it were a roommate, say. This is a report from the ...”

“... theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English literature.’ Peter ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... question means: he was tired. So I said yes and followed him to a room with two single beds. We lay down and it was odd to think of it, the two of us lying there, 45 years between us, the wind and rain howling outside the house and the beams creaking like the ones in an old ship. ‘What you thinking about?’ he said. ‘Moby Dick,’ I lied. ‘Me ...”

“... in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia supported his Atlantic Charter, hoping that it would lay the foundation for an international social democratic order. By 1943, Roosevelt was holding up the ‘illustration of the republics of this continent’ as a model for postwar liberal multilateralism. Though he took credit for overcoming ‘many times 21 ...”

“... is the cheerfully unconvincing Cornwall of ‘Souvenir’, with its headless dogs and two old men, Paul and Paul, playing a traditional Lenten prank, putting on a sort of lugubrious cabaret turn for the tourists who drink elaborate cocktails – Sheep Dip, Blimlets, Blue Skies – in a hotel bar. The American edition of The ...”

“... shows up in the profane, and vice versa: Like pictures, or like bookes gay coverings, made For lay men, are all women thus arayd, Themselves are mistique books, which only wee Whom their imputed grace will dignify Must see revealed. ‘Elegy VIII’As Christ justifies unworthy believers through his imputed grace, so a woman dignifies her unworthy lover by ...”

“... relations with Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research – where so much of his future lay – and continued his secondary career as a writer on music. In the intellectual world of Weimar Germany, Frankfurt was Berlin’s sister city; and by 1928 Adorno had already made Berlin his second home. Musically, the presence of Schoenberg was a ...”