“... Adorno​ said of Wagner that he wrote ‘conductors’ music’. He meant this as a put-down, but most good orchestral music written between 1800 and 1920 was conductors’ music, grand in conception, intensely expressive, declamatory, scored for a large orchestra to be performed in imposing concert halls for a mass audience – music which, to be fully effective and to have maximum impact, required a co-ordinating mastermind to run the show ...”

“... There is only one baby in The Man without Qualities. Her mother is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards ...”

“... It’s unfashionable these days to play Bach on the piano. This, plus the fact that the authentic piano repertoire is Classical and Romantic, makes it easy for us to forget that the piano is above all a polyphonic instrument. No other keyboard instrument permits such subtle differentiation of parts (voice-leading, as it is called) through variation in the intensity and tone colour separately allotted to them ...”

“... In one of the European galleries at the British Museum, there’s a bronze medal of Erasmus made in Antwerp in 1519 by the artist Quentin Metsys. A portrait of Erasmus in profile is on the front of the medal. On the reverse, the smiling bust of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, and the words ‘concedo nulli’ – ‘I yield to no one.’* It’s said that Erasmus kept a figurine of the god Terminus on his desk ...”

“... You should say everything that comes into your head. Freud, ‘On Initiating Treatment’ (1913) There are things it’s better not to dwell on, things it’s normal to forget. The people who are starving or being tortured, the animals that live a life of hell to feed us, the unimaginable extension of the universe, or universes, the impersonality of the statistical laws to which our personal behaviour conforms, oblivion ...”

“... Had Franz Schubert​ been asked how he had come to write the song ‘Am Meer’ – he, who had never seen the sea and whose knowledge of it was limited to hearsay and the stylised depictions of painting and literature – he might have answered as, a hundred years later, Maurice Ravel answered, when a friend teasingly asked him how, since he never got up before ten thirty, he had come to write, in Daphnis and Chloe, an evocation of the dawn: ‘It was simple – I used my imagination ...”

“... 1918. No one knows war is coming, and with it the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. As Nicholas Spice said, writing about the novel a year and a half or so ago (LRB, 16 October 1997), it is part of its genius to make us almost forget the catastrophe which hangs over it. ‘Almost but not quite: we experience the unreal and troubled somnolence ...”

“... James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists – in ...”

“... to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this anthology hands over to Nicholas Spice, who in turn sensibly makes sure that Karl Miller’s long essay about the LRB heads the list of contents. This essay is to be relished, not least when it is most uncertain. If the style is less tortuous than usual, the stylist is even more ...”

“... listed as ‘hard to find’ (though Amazon.com will try) and one – a 1986 anthology edited by Nicholas Spice – is described as ‘out of print but if you place an order we may be able to find you a used copy within one to three months’. Where Amazon.com really challenges the traditional bookshop is in its hypertext links and its 22 ‘browsing ...”

“... was in danger of falling out.’ In these matters Pym has an undoubted resemblance to Jane Austen. Nicholas Spice, in his perceptive review of Crampton Hodnet in these columns, pointed out that in many ways the Pym world is as black as hell, the vision of marriage or celibacy, work and play, equally scarifying. D.W. Harding and other academic critics have ...”

“... equivocal. Its closed-mouthed narrator keeps tabs on his emotions and ignores much of his past. Nicholas Garrigan is a young doctor from Edinburgh, on secondment in Uganda and wet behind the ears, when he ends up, by chance, as personal physician to Idi Amin. According to his version of things, he was just another lickspittle making the most of the ...”

“... living on TV in that decade, appearing in the corners of living-rooms by night to interview the Spice Girls while animadverting by day on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners in the New Yorker. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the Spice Girls side of his activities was what mostly stood out. When in ...”

“... to the beholders’. Cooking, here, is something like writing a Petrarchan sonnet, or painting a Nicholas Hilliard miniature, or dancing a pavane. Wall wants to resist the urge to trivialise what she calls ‘food wit’, preferring instead to take seriously a ‘transmutationalist gastronomy’ in which women took on the skills associated with the kind of ...”

“... cover. Like many of his plans from this period it came to nothing. In any case, sugar and spice weren’t really Finlay’s thing. When he started writing to Bann he was almost forty and an intermittently published short-story writer, playwright and poet. He had just published Rapel: Ten Fauve and Suprematist Poems (1963), his first foray into the new ...”