“... of mind, all of which are virtually unknown in Italy, except by some sophisticated readers of Joseph Roth, Bellow, Singer, Malamud, Potok, and of course yourself. Personally, I am satisfied with this book, mainly because I had good fun planning and writing it. For the first and only time in my life as a writer, I had ...”

“... opinions, particularly about the Forties and Fifties. We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish ...”

“... catchy. A greater richness does appear in the Late Victorian period; Sullivan’s contemporary Sir Joseph Barnby can stand as an example, and a growth in harmonic lushness can be traced among Edwardian church composers. Bradley worries that the Victorian hymn failed to give proper expression to the doubts which perplexed the age, though he makes an exception ...”

“... myth. Everett shares his taste for marrying comedy and philosophy with Thomas Pynchon and the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and Good as Gold. But there’s only one writer who resembles him in any significant way. Like Everett, J.M. Coetzee was a student of logic who turned to fiction. ‘My name is Eugene Dawn,’ the narrator of his early story ‘The ...”

“... When the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of syphilis – had been spending his time compiling an alphabetical list of cities. Nearly a year later, Brahms found Schumann doing almost the same thing: ‘I looked again at his reading matter,’ he reported back to Joachim ...”

“... not long before we discover that the Fullers could be as sharp over money as Will Piper. Next June Joseph Fuller was entrusted by Turner with the task of beating down a man who wanted nine guineas for a horse, but Joseph bought the animal himself, and barefacedly informed Turner that the price was now £11. Turner kept his ...”

“... the genealogy of Jesus in particular: all that begetting! But what exactly does descent entail? Joseph is of the House of David, but he is in no sense consanguineous; his is not the eidos that bore Christ’s essence and quickened the matter in Mary’s womb. That would be God. The prophecy is fulfilled because of a particular understanding of ...”

“... commemorations in Vienna, I spent several hours with him in the Hofburg, where the Emperor Joseph II’s huge golden office is now his. Our meeting had been planned as an informal talk on questions of faith and morality, rather than one more inquisition, of which he had by this time undergone dozens. His face alight, he lovingly explained a magnificent ...”

“... adolescence could not but command the appalled attention of everyone around him. A talented singer and raconteur, hard-drinking and gregarious, John spent countless hours in Dublin pubs drinking away a considerable inheritance (the family had owned a number of properties in Cork) and neglecting his duties in the various government departments that hired ...”

“... the Army. The original Gaspard Winckler is the deaf and dumb son of a fabulously wealthy opera singer. In an attempt to cure him she takes him on a round-the-world cruise on a yacht. Their ship is sunk in a hurricane off Tierra del Fuego. Only Gaspard Winckler’s body is never found ... The story breaks off abruptly here, and in Part Two, an omniscient ...”

“... to Putin’. Other directors included Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a former president of Poland; Joseph Cofer Black, who ran counterterrorism for the CIA under Bush; and Devon Archer, Biden’s longtime business partner, who brokered their directorships. Zlochevsky – at six feet two and 250 pounds, ‘pure mass wrapped in tailored suits and gentlemanly ...”

“... known for its churches’, according to Roger Rapoport.) He was taught by the Sisters of Saint Joseph and was known at school for his singing voice and his ability to make the nuns giggle. One of the nuns remembers him as the ‘brightest student’ she’d encountered in her entire teaching career. It seems that he always felt himself to be cleverer than ...”

“... there secular narrative will be: this is true and good for him, so that ‘every time an ancient singer composed a fresh song about some god or legendary hero, he was in effect bringing another small area of the primitive mind under aesthetic control.’ Such talk of ‘control’ and ‘the primitive mind’ can raise the spectre of Conrad’s Kurtz, whose ...”

“... owes something to the personal enthusiasm of successive Conservative ministers of education, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of ...”

“... they remain for the most part private. His chief eccentricity is being married to a popular singer. He is known to like football. In 2007, he told the US ambassador Clark Randt Jr that he had enjoyed Saving Private Ryan and The Departed, but was unimpressed with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Chinese martial arts genre more generally.Xi is part ...”