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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... judges her crisply. In what she wrote about other professional women – Madame de Staël and the singer Giuseppina Grassini, for example – one senses not so much intimacy as an understanding based on shared experience. The need to please and be pleased, to combine skill as a painter with deference, to demand much of yourself but be easy as well – all ...”

“... not. Many of Rossetti’s dead use their coldness to control the overconfidence of the living: the singer in ‘Song’ urges her lover not to grieve, because, when dead, ‘Haply I may remember,/And haply may forget,’ a casualness which implies that he is not nearly as important as he might think. ‘Remember me,’ another dying lover pleads, before ...”

“... write books than I accept, I am not available to ghost the memoirs of this or that actor or opera singer, and I would never agree to work in advertising. On the other hand, I am perfectly prepared to do a full-time job which does not utilise my skills as a writer, and to get on with my writing in my spare time. I have a gift for organising my time ...”

“... three girls behind him were 14 years old. The same question could be raised in relation to another singer, Bryan Ferry, or the actress Minnie Driver, or the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. How exactly did Epstein come to have ten numbers for Peter Mandelson? We are all, to some extent, defined by the company we keep, and if ...”