“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”

“... part of a verse of the Old Hundredth (the name Waugh gave to one of his fictional night-clubs). Edward FitzGerald chose that verse for his tombstone, well-remembering the 12th-century verse he had translated from the Persian: ‘We are helpless: thou hast made us what we are.’ Henry VI wrote a prayer: Domine Jesu, qui me creasti, redimsti et preordinaste ...”

“... or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad behaviour against the extraordinary labour she devoted to transcribing, editing and promoting Dickinson’s work. It also chronicles the trials ...”

“... the following textual emendation:From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute ...”

“... photograph of Raymond has as its gratuitously spiteful caption a quotation from Dafydd-Ellis Thomas, ‘the best-cut tweeds on the Left’. Still more gratuitous is the sneering caption which Inglis has dreamed up for a photograph of Raymond and Joy, taken in 1940-1 during their courting days – the kind of loving picture which would not look out of ...”

“... than anyone else currently writing to give up, putting them in the position of the narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, who hears Glenn Gould play and realises that although he is gifted enough as a performer to attend the same piano masterclass in Salzburg, there is simply no point in making any more efforts in that line. He gives away his Steinway ...”

“... you know why it’s called the Black Dwarf?’ ‘No.’ He went on: ‘It was a paper created by Thomas Wooler, a very radical journalist, for the miners really: miners were stunted after generations of working in these mines, and when they came out of the mines in the evening their faces were covered with soot. So Tom Wooler decided to call the paper the ...”

“... children’s establishments; the hand-to-mouth existence of a perennially unemployed father, Thomas Dobeson, on Sydney’s outskirts, and his defensive stock of ridicule for politicians and emigration agents, with all their ‘fairytales’ about the ‘land of promise’.As hero of this volume, I prefer the legendary statistician Timothy Coghlan. He ...”

“... By the time I got to Belfast and phoned him again the line was dead. 13. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, a known figure in the IRA, was gunned down at his home on 19 March 1920. The late-night callers were three members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. One of them was later identified as District-Inspector Oswald Swanzy. The Chief Secretary for ...”

“... her first in any language.The most eloquent invocation of the seedy set-up was made by the poet Thomas Hood, who used Crachami’s exhibition to illustrate the price of fame, or of visibility, even in a person who was hardly visible to begin with. (Hood may have had in mind a sketch by John Augustus Atkinson which shows a man standing in the doorway of a ...”

“... don’t see why not.’ So while​ this is certainly a ‘literature of power’, in the terms of Thomas De Quincey, it is also ‘a literature of knowledge’. You either will or won’t recognise the references to Brueghel’s painting Dulle Griet, say, or Holbein’s Dance of Death, or Brecht’s 1940 radio play The Trial of Lucullus, or John Arthos’s ...”

“... making him seem like an American saviour who took a bullet for his own people.The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was wearing a T-shirt for a YouTube channel called DemolitionRanch, which has 11.7 million subscribers. He was a registered Republican who donated $15 to ActBlue, a register-to-vote pressure group. He was killed instantly by Secret Service snipers ...”