“... writers, directors, saints, impostors, undercover journalists – martyrs for the truth, and masters of ...”

“... that the latter are art historians at all. He calls them ‘the fallen’, a category in which John Berger becomes Gombrich’s unlikely bedfellow: for the provocative reductionism of Berger’s Ways of Seeing, equating painting with property, shares with Art and Illusion an appeal to a firm wall of material fact.If the discourse of form collapsed, this ...”

“... Vespers, and in 1985 Bach’s Mass in B minor. These were followed by a selection of Renaissance masters, especially Tallis (1989) and Josquin (1993), and an influential recording of Bach’s St John Passion (1991). For the Bach recordings, Parrott employed no more than two singers on each of the chorus parts and used the ...”

“... for a magnificent town house by Hyde Park and two hundred acres in Essex. He acquired Old Masters from impoverished French nobles; his daughters practised their drawing with the aid of three Rembrandts. He spent his way into Parliament and stayed for 45 years, perfecting the image of a high-minded humanitarian reformer. He was intimate with the ...”

“... colonial conquest that 18th-century pessimists, such as Rousseau or the Russophile English cleric John Brown, believed to be driving the continent towards a future of unrelenting chaos and despotism. In his 1795 essay ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’, Kant wrote that to break this cycle of violence and oppression might require a single ‘powerful and ...”

“... China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of germ warfare by the ...”

“... been kind to the music of Schumann’s final creative decade; and it is one of the strengths of John Daverio’s book that it devotes so much space to a sympathetic account of some sadly neglected works: not only to Genoveva and Das Paradies und die Peri, but also to the Scenen aus Göthe’s ‘Faust’, as well as Schumann’s second oratorio, Der Rose ...”

“... didn’t even need democracy: fellow-feeling would have been enough. My great-great-grandfather John Low, arguing against Lord Dalhousie’s proposal to annex Nagpur in 1854, recalled from his experience all over India cases of our having suffered heavy losses in revenue, and very extensive losses in human lives, owing to the want of wealth among our native ...”

“... it’s a variation of flavour rather than a difference between species. Guy Davenport, one of the masters of essay form, wrote two sparkling pieces a year apart on table manners, one for the Hudson Review in 1979, the other for Antaeus in 1980. Shockingly, there is no overlap between them, though cannibalising your own material is generally regarded as ...”

“... the drawing room – and sat me by a different fireplace and an old but different desk – was John Macfie, a tall and whiskery gentleman who lives there with his family. He poured me a whisky before sitting down in a red armchair beside the darkened windows. ‘At the front, in Louis’s bedroom, you get the punctuation of street noise,’ he ...”

“... philosophical discussions of the Enlightenment have done little more than echo the original masters, usually with a bias towards Hegel and Romanticism. In his urbane study of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), however, Ernst Cassirer launched an appeal against ‘the verdict of the Romantic Movement on the Enlightenment’. Accusations of ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... deduce that Ezra Pound, let alone William Carlos Williams, had ever existed. Who now are the Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely ...”

“... authors whose names are whispered among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only ...”