“... the virtual extinction of original English music for more than a hundred years’. Richard Luckett will have no truck with cultural snobbery of this sort, even if he fastidiously forgets ‘Hallelujah’ when he writes that in ‘For now is Christ risen’ Christ is ‘named for the first time in Messiah’. His quirky, learned, acerbic book ...”

“... the American Revolution had prevented her from singing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall in Washington DC. Thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, she performed instead for an audience of 75,000 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Two years before she sat for Delaney, she sang at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.Portrayed face on, in the ...”

“... to victory, destroyed by war, a warning for peace.’ There’s an illuminating chapter on the Hall of Heroes, the Valhalla Monument built by Leo von Klenze at the behest of Ludwig I of Bavaria on a hill overlooking the Danube (it’s also the subject of a painting by Turner, who was present at its opening in 1842). Friezes display Germania, the symbol of ...”

“... illusionistic feats that kept the magician-showmen Maskelyne and Cooke in business at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, for many years. Spiritualism also had affinities with Theosophy (and the ineffable Madame Blavatsky, into whose arcane orbit a handful of spiritualists wandered, only to be violently repelled). On the other hand, an outgrowth of early ...”

“... whose one-man ‘Ascent of Mont Blanc’ shows attracted standing-room-only crowds at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for several seasons – published The Physiology of Evening Parties in 1846, and followed it up with a series of ‘natural histories’ of such types as ‘stuck-up people’, ballet girls, idlers on the town, and ‘gents’. The most ...”

“... ignominiously by a general strike. In 1923, Ludendorff took part in the equally unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch, led by Adolf Hitler and his infant Nazi Party. In the Allied countries, there was general rejoicing at the victory. This had been, it was thought, the war that would end all wars. Those in the know were not so sure. On the day the armistice was ...”

“... for a long time’. Hitler, he wrote, had already ‘secured for himself a place of honour in the Hall of Fame of our Volk’. It is hard to understand why Berghahn finds it ‘difficult to penetrate Sethe’s thoughts’ during this period, let alone why he thinks Sethe ‘clearly did not welcome’ the creation of a one-party Nazi state. Sethe’s support ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay ...”

“... took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American ...”

“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... of a theatrical protest that took place outside the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall in 1971. For the re-creation, five women, dressed in black with lights attached to their bodies, moved to create bright trails of light. ‘Doing it again,’ Kelly said, ‘I was trying to ask – what’s passed on from one generation to the next?’ Also ...”

“... to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks ...”

“... but ‘a raffish ace witness’; the young Shakespeare is not ‘confident’ but ‘cocksure’; Richard III is not only sometimes close to Hall – ‘Richard and Buckingham dutifully go through their historical paces’; Joan of Arc ‘scampers’ and ‘boggles’, Adonis ...”

“... where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he manages this without much help, which is ...”