“... and most celebrated, the wistful main theme unfolds over simple (but, for their time, unusual) major seventh chords. This theme never develops: instead, it is repeated. The atmosphere is one of perfect calm and melancholy serenity. There are no changes in dynamics. The tune is stated, and then it’s gone. It’s all over in about two and a half perfect ...”

“... New York and the other some weeks later in Salzburg, in a lean, semi-staged concert rendition by John Eliot Gardiner and his period-instrument Orchestre Romantique et Révolutionnaire. This was followed, again in Salzburg, by Georg Solti conducting several staged performances of Fidelio, and in New York by Kurt Masur and the NY Philharmonic doing one ...”

“... which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in Toledo – could be regarded as a practical way of encouraging solidarity, and perhaps it took no longer to complete than it took for the alliance to prepare its navy. The author claims that it was in the 17th century that ...”

“... 1938 was the date of its predecessor Night and Morning). Social criticism: this is one of the two major preoccupations of Irish writers in the 20th century, whether the tone is glum, angry, ironic or ebullient. The other notable enterprise in contemporary Irish writing is the retrieval, or acknowledgement, of some facet of the past, generally for the purpose ...”

“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”

“... in 1991; Lamar Cecil needed two books to capture the life, the second published in 1996. Now comes John Röhl, with the first of three projected volumes. Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious idea, would doubtless have been pleased by the thought of a thousand-page doorstopper devoted to his youth. It is unlikely that he would have enjoyed ...”

“... by the former chief executive of the Tomkins conglomerate, Arthur Andersen did not take over any major accountancy firm, nor was it taken over. Its current annual fee revenue is more than seven billion dollars. It was assisted into the big time by its consulting arm Andersen Consulting, whose current annual revenue is more than eight billion dollars. The ...”

“... his most celebrated poems were written from literal translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by ...”

“... is to do with its still shimmering quality. The film was an alchemical success: Frank Sinatra, John Frankenheimer, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey would never better their performances here. ‘Something in the story, something in the times,’ Marcus writes, ‘that had to have been sensed, felt, but never thought out, never shaped into a theory or a ...”

“... Dickens, Hardy figure in almost every story of a life transformed by reading, along with the major poets (Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson), dramatists (none matched Shakespeare and Shaw in popularity), discursive prose writers (Carlyle and Ruskin are the constant companions of the earnest seeker after light), and the great unclassifiable, ...”

“... to feel pain.’ And he goes on to credit the Victorian ‘revulsion from pain’ with ‘a major role, far transcending the narrow question of kindness to animals, in reshaping prevailing visions of the “good life” and the good society’. Indeed, it is to the same source that he attributes the present-day ‘pervasiveness of the so-called ...”

“... staffer of the Eye and co-published by the Eye. Reviewers? Auberon Waugh in the Daily Mail; John Wells twice, once in Harper’s and once in the Times; Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the ...”

“... be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial affirmation for the marriage and, although 13 further births ...”

“... albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s ...”