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“... 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 ...”

“... to woo her, she was already little different from a prostitute. New Zealand’s prime minister, Joseph Ward, seemed to agree. After telegraphing his story on the hearing to the editor of the Evening Post, Scholefield received a telegram informing him that a judge in New Zealand had issued a suppression order on all reporting of the case. Until the order was ...”

“... by the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War. We know he and Ruth socialised with the singer and radical Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, and with a brilliant former student, the Pan-Africanist and communist George Padmore. We know British intelligence kept an eye on his movements.In September, Bunche’s family went home. He went to South ...”

“... became the leader of the Soviet Union’s most successful jazz band. ‘Like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer,’ Frederick Starr observed in Red and Hot, his wonderful history of Soviet jazz, Utyosov ‘seized on the new American music as a means of establishing a niche for himself in the non-Jewish world’. In fact, according to a visiting British ...”

“... joined in their grave shortly afterwards by their grieving vent-widow. In the 1950s, an Australian singer who used to appear on stage with her vent-husband Herbert Dexter found that he was taking his dummy-insults and dummy-assaults too far both on stage and off, and sued him for divorce, reputedly citing the ‘miserable dummy’ as co-respondent. It is not ...”

“... panels of her costume like a plump English rose trying to play the innkeeper’s wife who turns Joseph and Mary away in a school nativity play. Her role as a dream creature indifferent to the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike ...”