“... large the paintings do look very much at home in these vaulted spaces. It could well be, as Michel Strauss suggested while we were standing in the biggest space, that Picasso’s art always tends to look at home in spaces akin to those of Medieval churches. Indeed, it seems to me that at the Tate many of the late paintings look as if they are Medieval ...”

“... swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when one ...”

“... meant the pushing aside of scripture, the historical particularities of which David Friedrich Strauss and countless others were just then demonstrating. Romantic conceptions of the self and wissenschaftliche approaches to the Bible combined to produce a liberal theology according to which the Bible was a cultural document rather than a series of ...”

“... closest she came to writing about a grand system-builder was a short early review of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and this was a mistake she might not have made had she known him then as the architect of French Structuralism rather than the eccentric bellettrist of Tristes Tropiques. There is no Kant, no Nietzsche, no Marx in Sontag – yet, suddenly, here is ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of ...”

“... literary studies. It includes Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. In dealing with deconstruction, one is obliged to take up the polemic swirling around it. Norris, fortunately, does not blame that polemic simply on the obtuseness of the opposition. He knows that vital prejudices are involved, and they go beyond the ...”

“... folk songs soothingly empty of harmonic dialectic. And in the city, the whirl and gaiety of Strauss waltzes, the gemütlichkeit of the coffee house, the optimism of the New Year’s Day concert and the splendour of the Opera Ball. Jelinek’s project was to smash up all of this. In 1976, she made a TV documentary about life in a village in the Austrian ...”

“... in Hardy’s phrase, ‘selves unseeing’. Setting the poem eighty years after Schubert, Richard Strauss overrode these delicacies of sentiment in favour of an outpouring of ecstatic love (the young man’s), pulsing with sensuality and the rush of the blood. His setting – Fragonard to Schubert’s Watteau – scaled up the expressive range to the fully ...”

“... formalism haunted French structuralism, and not only because Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss worked together; Walter Benjamin’s thinking was often, perhaps always, inseparable from the turns his language took. Even the austere Adorno said that one could ‘hardly speak of aesthetic matters ...”

“... delightful melodies and attracting composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss to write music for the instrument. I once heard Bruno Hoffmann, the most celebrated modern exponent, play his version of Franklin’s glass armonica. The sound was unforgettable – piercing, melancholy, otherworldly. And we have not mentioned the ...”

“... steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to registrars ...”

“... he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to concerts ...”

“... eating. France is, for example, the home of the scholarly study of food. The analogies of Lévi-Strauss, from the dyadic structure of English and French meals to honey, ashes and cannibalism. One hundred and forty-two pages on the history of food in Fernand Braudel’s magnificent new Les Structures du Quotidien.3 ‘Food is a sort of grill,’ wrote the ...”

“... state disinfectant, Wofasept. Not unpleasant: almost a cosy fug. It didn’t need the portrait of Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), to tell you where you were. Now the smell has gone, unforgotten by elderly noses but irretrievably extinct. There are plenty of Ostalgie museums in today’s united Germany, furnished with ...”

“... bath’. Relations between the orchestra and the conductor, Hans von Bülow, grew strained: Franz Strauss, father of Richard and the brilliant first horn of the Munich orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his wife’s Isolde, caught a chill on stage ...”