“... Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed with at least a presumption of happiness ever after. There are cross-currents and undercurrents that make Meistersinger’s libretto subtle in ways that the librettos of operas usually aren’t ...”

“... view of the period, which takes the idea of an English Renaissance to be elitist and aestheticist. Richard Halpern​ knows that European tragedy has often followed the Greeks. His Eclipse of Action starts with an account of the Oresteia and ends with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a viscerally shocking play which reworks atrocities from tragic tradition. As turning ...”

“... on a Nazi blacklist. His final choice of record, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, made the point that Wagner and German culture belonged just as much to an Austrian Jew and adoptive Brit as to the Nazis.After four episodes, the BBC’s listener research department reported that 146 military units had given the programme a solid B-plus. The idea and the castaways ...”

“... some recent scepticism. New attention has been paid to the political ambiguity of the class, and Richard Hamilton has argued that the Nazi electoral base owed less to the petty-bourgeoisie and more to the bourgeoisie proper than previously assumed. He analysed electoral districts and also made imaginative use of voting returns from fashionable holiday ...”

“... Now is a brilliant instance of the fear made present. When American helicopters heave into view, Wagner blaring from their tapedecks, when the jungle goes up in sheets of flame, when a jeep explodes, when a bridge shatters, when the villagers die, we are witnessing not the folly of war, but the terrifying spectacle of power without a mind. This sense of ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... from the Field (2017), the former director of Iranian affairs at the National Security Council, Richard Nephew, described the sanctions as based on ‘objectives for the imposition of pain’, accompanied by instructions for ‘the conditions necessary for the removal of pain’. It’s the torturer’s schema, taken straight from the war on terror ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... away from polyphonic values he rejected it. Hence his ‘blind spot’ for music between Bach and Wagner, his championing of pre-Classical composers like Sweelinck, Gibbons and Byrd, his love of the late Romantics (especially Strauss) and his love of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.Auden said of Rimbaud that verse was a special illness of his ear, and one could ...”

“... extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most ...”

“... Manchester. When the two men met, Balfour confessed that he had discussed the Jews with Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth and shared ‘many of her anti-semitic prejudices’. Weizmann replied that ‘Germans of Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable and demoralising phenomenon.’ However, at that meeting and a later one in January 1906 at the Queen’s Hotel in ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ...”

“... conversation with the next generation of composers – Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner. As it was, though he wrote copiously in all the major forms except the concerto, his immediate influence was confined to the lied, and it took the rest of the century and the good offices of Mendelssohn, Schumann and, especially, Brahms for the full range ...”

“... God’s word.)*In Pennsylvania, it is revealed that the Republican candidate for governor, Scott Wagner, lost $631,000 in campaign funds over the summer through unsuccessful investments in a brokerage account.*The Environmental Protection Agency announces plans to dissolve its Office of the Science Adviser, which counsels on the scientific research ...”