“... has been central to debates about the relations between intellectuals and the state since before young Werther got sorrowful; possibly ever since the play was adapted as Der bestrafte Brudermord soon after its first appearance. Certainly once Shakespeare was naturalised by the Schlegel-Tieck translation and others in the early 1800s as ‘the third German ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... echo of distant gunfire. The political debate in The Book and the Brotherhood is conducted between David Crimond, writer of a book of left-wing political theory, and the brotherhood, a sort of trust set up by a group of friends to provide Crimond with a regular income while he writes the book. The brotherhood, otherwise humorously known as the ...”

“... In 1918, the intensity of Yeats’s fascination with the young American phenomenon Ezra Pound had cooled enough for Jack Butler Yeats to supply his son with some smouldering paternal wisdom: The poets loved of Ezra Pound are tired of Beauty, since they have met it so often ... I am tired of Beauty my wife, says the poet, but here is that enchanting mistress Ugliness ...”

“... publications go to die. London, once the City of Gallows, is now a red glow at twilight. Young women who fall for the temptation of a night in town, a showbiz party, face a silent carriage for the journey home; bruises earned fighting off the kind of men who insist on wearing riding boots in bed. The ‘bad’ Bembo cousin, Wilfred, reinvented as ...”

“... is not always invested where the paying public wants it most: in the decidedly mobile assets of young players. Prices have risen exponentially: for transfers, tickets, tacky merchandise. The combined salaries of Premiership players have doubled over the last four years to £96 million, but there is a huge gap between the richer and poorer clubs. Meanwhile ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... their breath as ‘bastards’ (John Major) or openly denouncing them as fruitcakes and loonies (David Cameron, until they threatened to engulf his party), but more often singing to their tune, denouncing ‘Brussels’ as a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, but one out of which he (or more often she) had managed to screw ‘a good deal for Britain’. For ...”

“... existed. That sentiment persisted until the 1967 war. Even two years after it, when the young Max Hastings visited Israel, he, like so many, was ‘thrilled by the brilliance of Israel’s military achievement’, as he said in his recent Leonard Stein lectures, in which he went on to describe his subsequent disillusionment. Tony Judt is now an ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew ...”

“... Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a ...”

“... itself. We’d done it! Here was Benjamin Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.’The young Reg didn’t like himself: ‘I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to.’ As his parents fought, he found solace in his bedroom, where everything was kept in perfect order. He began to study the ...”

“... Pierre Simonard, as her joint fathers. Thus, at the moment when the revolution began, the three young women were already outside the conventions of bourgeois society and at best insecurely connected to the lower ranks of the aristocracy.Clothes had played their part in the gathering of revolutionary momentum. Before the (entirely male) Estates General ...”