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“... twenty years, and while he’s still far from being a fixture of concert programmes, most of his major works have been recorded, often to favourable reviews.Jeremy Dibble is an admirer. Delius’s music was the soundtrack to his teenage years; he was drawn to its ‘lyricism and poetry’. His book focuses on Delius’s compositional processes. ‘We can ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... mechanism for coping with surplus fertility? The ancient and long-successful answer, suggests John Boswell, is abandonment: handing your child over to The Kindness of Strangers. What Boswell starts from is some well-known stories, those of Oedipus, of Romulus and Remus, of Paris, Perdita, or Moses in the bulrushes. The child cannot or must not be kept but ...”

“... consent. Robinson had been ready to be a ‘persuader’ within the Unionist community, but when Major had shown the DUP his door, he could, he said, ‘have wept that the prime minister of the United Kingdom could behave in such a childish way’. ‘I’m interested that you talk in terms of crying. Isn’t part of your problem that public opinion on the ...”

“... fragment’, as another character observes) is this rich and dense account of a life rendered. As John Bainbridge sifts through his rag-bag of memories, we close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an ...”

“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John Singer Sargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant crowd-dazzler and populariser; like Sargent, he is unadventurous in his choice of precedents; like Sargent, a dashing but flattering ...”

“... Kipling, a bit of a road-hog who had the nerve to proclaim that the car had at last brought a major blood sport to Britain. His fellow poet and road-hog, John Masefield, also exulted as he traversed the Downs at furious speed, his Overland emitting ‘soul-animating strains’ (doubtless from a Gabriel horn). And the ...”

“... and bypassing civil service rules on appointments. (Coincidentally, her husband, the Tory MP John Penrose, is Johnson’s official ‘anti-corruption champion’.) The National Institute for Health Protection is a very Johnsonian creation: combining NHS Test and Trace with Public Health England, it was designed by the management consulting firm McKinsey ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... and politics. Nicolson is equally disapproving of Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the other major theme of Three Guineas, war and the causes of war, a theme which was to her a kind of posthumous discussion with Julian Bell about his decision to go to Spain. She suspected his motives and could not find them altogether admirable. Nicolson’s verdict is ...”

“... connection with the homeland. Such rites of passage became the staple of popular fiction. In John Buchan’s The Half-Hearted, a cynical and lethargic young man is persuaded to use his knowledge of the Indian frontier to help foil an invasion, and the challenge transforms him. ‘Life was quick in his sinews, his brain was a weathercock, his strength was ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... of battle. Stagnation of movement and morale was rarely alleviated, but when a major action came, the end was sudden and bloody: 17 of the 22 officers in his battalion were killed or wounded. Raymond Asquith did not ...”

“... fit the bare facts of the life. For one thing, Bowie hasn’t stopped singing about death since Major Tom drifted off into outer space in the late 1960s; ‘Here I am/Not quite dying’ goes the opening track on The Next Day. And what about the songs that don’t fit the facts? No one, as far as I’m aware, has suggested that ‘Sue (Or in a Season of ...”