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“... very idiosyncratic account of Christian history, ‘tracing patterns unimaginable by others’, as Edward Mendelson remarks – a disparaging view the poet himself later accepted. Throughout the time he was working on The Age of Anxiety the tone of his thinking was rather bleakly religious. The poem is set on the night of All Souls, a feast of which the ...”

“... Syberberg commented in his filmed interview with the aged, unashamed Führer-familiar Winifred Wagner in 1975. Eighty years after Hitler came to power in Germany, is it possible to imagine the world when the Third Reich was new? Before September 1939 and even after the Second World War began, the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s ...”

“... wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers ...”

“... When​ Edward Said joined the Columbia University English department in 1963, a rumour spread that he was a Jew from Alexandria. He might as well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews ...”

“... spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired ...”

“... Manchester. When the two men met, Balfour confessed that he had discussed the Jews with Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth and shared ‘many of her anti-semitic prejudices’. Weizmann replied that ‘Germans of Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable and demoralising phenomenon.’ However, at that meeting and a later one in January 1906 at the Queen’s Hotel in ...”

“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers – do not care to admit that they missed the big ...”

“... or not. The games he plays with ‘happen’ and with ‘across’ indeed must owe something to Wagner. They cannot be indebted to Proust because Proust wasn’t available in 1908. But eventually Proust, and the fictional composer Vinteuil, became very important to the business of faking rhythms. Forster bought a copy of Du côté de chez Swann – the ...”

“... the works of Shakespeare. In The Literature and Art of the Empire (1924), Major A.A. Longden and Edward Salmon claimed that Cranmer’s prophecy supplied ‘proof of Shakespeare’s confidence in England’s destiny’, while for J.A.R. Marriott, writing in 1918, it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than ...”

“... God’s word.)*In Pennsylvania, it is revealed that the Republican candidate for governor, Scott Wagner, lost $631,000 in campaign funds over the summer through unsuccessful investments in a brokerage account.*The Environmental Protection Agency announces plans to dissolve its Office of the Science Adviser, which counsels on the scientific research ...”

“... if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui tout a été fait’, and perhaps it was because ‘He’ had had a hand in everything that Messiaen felt free to avail ...”

“... almost to the day, Heber-to Padilla left Cuba for good. American admirers had approached Senator Edward Kennedy to intercede in his favour with Fidel Castro. Senator Kennedy called Castro collect, and 24 hours later Padilla had an exit permit, two plane tickets and a lukewarm farewell from Fidel himself – as Padilla told everybody later. The story belongs ...”