“... of us have by now become more modest in our ambitions. Davidson, however, writes philosophy like Wagner wrote operas: nothing less than everything is ever at stake. There has to be a place in philosophers’ heaven for people who have ideas for really stunning arguments which, in the event, don’t quite work. I don’t think that languages have to be ...”

“... it is good and sharp’. Yet despite the grand presentation of excess (Grainger’s letters, like Wagner’s, sometimes read as if they were instruction booklets on how to satisfy ultimate needs), the man behind it only rarely transcends the feelings of an overgrown brat. This is the famous Grainger in extremis – a self-styled ‘lightning conductor’ of ...”

“... composers are usually more in need than great ones. A Beethoven-Jahr does no one much good; a Wagner-Jahr no good to anyone. But, surprisingly, all three of ‘85 could do with some decent celebrations. Scarlatti is the most neglected. How many of us know even a dozen of his sonatas? Yet the pianist (I do not presume to advise the harpsichordist) will ...”

“... demolition of Victorian musical gentility and amateurism, alongside his mission to promote Wagner (not to mention his fight for acceptable standards in the performance of Mozart and his expert appraisal of Italian opera) remain timely, or timeless, though the occasions have passed. Shaw, like Keller, is aggressive, provocative, an unashamed ...”

“... to see those of his companions whom he had left on the more familiar road.’ Modernists such as Wagner, Liszt, Schoenberg and indeed Boulez all took or would take this more familiar road. The harmonic daring is what gives Fauré’s music its particular frisson, the frisson of the suddenly new that Walter Pater’s Gaston de Latour finds in the poetry of ...”

“... of three books about Mahler, has edited a new one, The Mahler Companion. Two other biographies, by Peter Franklin and Jonathan Carr, have recently appeared. And, of course, there are recordings – well over a thousand versions of twenty works. A Mahler Discography, published in 1995, is already thoroughly out of date. One starts to wonder: is there such a ...”

“... the sonata was the furthest he was prepared to go in accommodating himself to the recent past. Wagner, in some ways the inheritor of Chopin’s erotically-charged Romanticism, learned the art of fugue from Theodor Weinlig, a successor to Bach as cantor of St Thomas’s, Leipzig, and there is a fugue in the finale of the symphony he wrote when he was ...”

“... production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a ...”

“... those supercooled, Stygian tempi. By explaining the earlier development of Klemperer’s art, Peter Heyworth’s biography places the notorious aspects of its last phase in a proper perspective, and restores balance to a reputation which has become, in England at any rate, lopsided. It teaches us, for example, that Klemperer’s tempi were not always ...”

“... part in dismantling the hierarchies of respect and deference in the Ancien Régime. She echoes Peter Wagner’s comment in Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment (1988) that Enlightenment pornography was ‘a vehicle of protest against the authority of Church-State’. Yet she is notably more reticent than ...”

“... as the Nihonjinron, literally the ‘theory of Japaneseness’. Nihonjinron is the subject of Peter Dale’s book, the style of which is marred somewhat by his own almost Nihonjinronish fondness for psycho-socio-anthropological jargon. He has interesting things to say, however. The intellectual quest for the essence of Japaneseness is a huge industry in ...”

“... made a puny attempt to look about him and make architectural contacts. But the innovations of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann unnerved him, and he could hardly yet have understood the sophisticated mockery of Adolf Loos. Still, Vienna lodged somewhere at the back of his mind, starting the trickle of thought that was to entice him away from ornament and towards ...”

“... Now is a brilliant instance of the fear made present. When American helicopters heave into view, Wagner blaring from their tapedecks, when the jungle goes up in sheets of flame, when a jeep explodes, when a bridge shatters, when the villagers die, we are witnessing not the folly of war, but the terrifying spectacle of power without a mind. This sense of ...”

“... which combines a vision of ecological apocalypse with a description of attending a performance of Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera, he examines his place in the public world with macabre humour: Young love, moon-flooded hut, and the act ends. House lights. The matron on my left exclaims. We gasp and kiss. Our mothers were best friends. Now, old as ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”