“... the anecdotal information about how a tired girl slumps, or a laundress leans on an iron, or a singer gestures to an audience, or a jockey turns in the saddle, are abandoned for an almost abstract consideration of the body and its movement in space. Painting was his life, paintings his one extravagance. When he died his collection included works by El ...”

“... was the life and soul of the party, observant of every detail. Food was bought on the way ... Peter Pears and Britten would often give her [Princess Mary] a small, private recital, just half a dozen Schubert songs that were then in their repertory – not too taxing for anybody. Still, there is inevitably some matter in the book, and until Donald ...”

“... In​ an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Howard Hawks said there was a ‘great fault’ with Bringing Up Baby (1938): ‘There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball.’ At the helm of these crazies, with Cary Grant’s palaeontologist in tow, is Katharine Hepburn’s Susan, except is she really crazy? Her dialogue has the stamp of the Marx Brothers’ best lines – mad-sounding but strangely logical – and for all her daffiness, her relentless speed, her loopy Bryn Mawr voice, she’s often telling the truth: there really is a leopard, and it really does love the song ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby ...”

“... symbolic identities: thus Lady Germaine Gordon Pitt. Lady Amherst; or Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden. Each of the stories involves a formidable exercise in expository explanation. The author has grossly miscalculated the amount of pure information that a reader even a well-disposed reader – can be expected to assimilate. Paragraph after ...”

“... the fourth section Lisa has recovered under Freud’s analysis and resumed her career as an opera-singer, remarrying and going to live in Kiev with her Russian husband, also a singer, whose first wife Lisa had understudied. He disappears in the Stalinist purges, and in the fifth section Lisa and her stepson are murdered in ...”

“... the year that Little Richard – a Macon native who had made a small name for himself as a gospel singer before switching over to rhythm and blues – recorded ‘Tutti Frutti’. Redding fell in love with the song, and with Little Richard’s voice, which he found himself capable of imitating. In 1957, when Little Richard returned to the church and left his ...”

“... haven – souls trying to enter Paradise. The official who passes judgment on them is called Peter Fischer. Just in case you miss the point, the walls of his office are hung with pictures of his fishing trips around the world. It’s the dialogue between the asylum seekers and their interrogators – initially the interpreter and Fischer together, later ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... Mourning (1965), dust-jacketed in tasteful purple, into my hands for a review. An assiduous hymn-singer, I had long realised that centuries other than ours had different views on the subject, especially when I came across Charles Wesley’s verses (written in August 1744 on the morrow of a Cardiff Methodist’s funeral) whose rollicking anapaests were widely ...”

“... quite as strong as our sense of jubilation, of ‘a giant step for mankind’. Further, as Peter and Leni Gillman suggest (prosaically or poetically), ‘Space Oddity’ sounds like an experience of shooting heroin, and they sternly quote another Bowie lyric: Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, We know Major Tom’s a junkie. Anyway, Major Tom helped to ...”

“... Halfway​ through Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), the heroine, a young singer called Thea Kronborg, travels to the Southwest and takes for herself a little rock room among the cliff dwellings. She is accompanied by her soon-to-be-lover Fred Ottenburg – wealthy and secretly married – but the purpose of the pilgrimage is to be alone, to think and to strengthen her voice:Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind – almost in her hands ...”

“... death in 1927, at the age of 50. In those days film was in its infancy and still silent (The Jazz Singer was released the year Duncan died). Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she did, Duncan couldn’t imagine dancing on film without it. But more than that, the absence of ...”

“... of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.Cassell, 452 pp., 1959Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.Arrow, 400 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 0 09 950402 3Food Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy by Susan Ambler-Edwards, Kate Bailey, Alexandra Kiff, Tim Lang, Robert Lee, Terry Marsden, David Simons and Hardin Tibbs.Chatham ...”

“... hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children,’ Major remarks in My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, ‘the talent to entertain was not among them,’ which must be one of the ...”

“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”