“... Four years later, during rehearsals for a revival of the first production, one of von Bülow’s young assistants had a mental breakdown, apparently brought on by the opera, and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.We enjoy the stories about Tristan und Isolde ...”

“... posing as a die-hard fan (in some versions of the story she leaped out of a giant birthday cake). Roger Edens, an MGM composer who was Garland’s music coach, and perhaps the most important artistic influence on her career, had written a new arrangement of the song (which was twenty years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I ...”

“... The main difficulty, as I see it, is that, as Professor Robert Reiner pointed out a decade ago, young Afro-Caribbean males are likely to become disproportionately involved in street crime since they are, as we know, disadvantaged in employment, housing and education, and they are bound, therefore, to be more often the targets of aggressive policing. The two ...”

“... of British intellectuals who have thought themselves above expressing national pride. A young academic (in his mid-thirties), he belongs to a generation which has become alert to the political importance of patriotism and which takes Britain’s European future pretty much for granted. His enjoyable tour through the past sixty years stops at the ...”

“... Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is ...”

“... knows about violence. She was born in Soweto, in a family of ten children, four of whom died young, one of them stabbed to death by unknown perpetrators when he was 21. As with many characters in this story, Judge Masipa’s life has followed violence from apartheid to its aftermath, and is revealing of the reality of South Africa’s hidden and unhidden ...”

“... traditional practice – very dusty, it is beginning to seem, as old ‘as history herself’, Roger Aubenas suggested in 1960, and very probably somewhat older than that. Some of the problems that could arise with Bray’s ‘brothers’ had already been revealed by the publication in 1994 of Pierre Chaplais’s studies on Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s ...”

“... infants have a right to life, because they lack this capacity (elsewhere in the book, he rejects Roger Scruton’s similar argument for meat-eating, noting that by Scruton’s logic it would also be permissible to eat lazy people who can’t be bothered to achieve anything). By contrast, ‘normal’ adults do have something like a right to life (although ...”

“... thought so. He seems to have admired Cézanne deeply, even if with a shake of the head at the young man’s chutzpah.Nonetheless, Cézanne came to Pissarro to unlearn his first style, and, seemingly, to change his mind about Courbet, Manet and Delacroix; or at least about what might be made from them, from their attitudes (their subjects, their ...”

“... the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch. Other members of his family, including a much-loved uncle and aunt, were quite active supporters of the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) movement. Neither then nor in retrospect did he register any allegiance of that sort. Ignatieff ...”

“... of murdering Lynette White on the basis of a false confession – and that his defence team, Roger Thorn and Robin Patton, were bold enough to challenge the admissibility of his confession. It was left to them to get Heron safely out of Leeds Crown Court. A decoy police van was used to divert the attention of the angry crowd, while Patton put Heron in ...”

“... of students, from universities and lycées alike, fighting riot police in clashes that left one young demonstrator dead, forced Chirac to withdraw plans to ‘modernise’ higher education. His government never recovered. In 1995, Juppé’s schemes to cut and reorganise social security were met with six weeks of strikes, engulfing every kind of public ...”

“... Rania was always making cakes and bringing them in for the staff and she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local ...”

“... investment. I contacted the three executive directors and 11 directors – Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the ...”