“... the problem of the post-Beethovenian piano sonata: all three of his sonatas, together with the C major Fantasie op. 17 were first drafted at this time. And at the end of the decade came those highly original cycles of shorter pieces, including Kreisleriana, Kinderscenen and the Humoreske. The systematic expansion of Schumann’s creative activities which ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... Ellison the writer, whose achievement collapses, for practical purposes, into the fate of his one major novel. And, finally, detailed by Rampersad really for the first time, there is Ellison the board member, teacher and cultural authority. Writers about Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David ...”

“... and by the time the Catch-22 money was rolling in Heller was stepping out. Daugherty makes no major effort to list the women passing through Heller’s life but there seem to have been a lot of them. Heller’s daughter, who got the facts from her mother, cites them by category: ‘friends of hers, of theirs, students, writers, PR ...”

“... while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had for so long been ...”

“... from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model. The Shakespeare was bound in the press’s traditional ...”

“... he was never beatified, let alone canonised. Not only did he lack charisma but, as a former army major educated at Haileybury, he was always something of an oddity within the Party, and despite many attempts to suggest the contrary, a dry stick. An old trade-union hack whom Attlee sacked from the Government pleaded his case with passion: ‘Why, Clem, for ...”

“... Dr Hill’s views, and so telling the many criticisms of them, that a book which took them as a major theme might now be redundant. One of Professor Ashton’s problems may have been that his book took him a long time to write, and that as a result many of his original views may have been challenged by the recent wave of ‘revisionism’. The revisionist ...”

“... is another matter: but at least one distinguished historian of Renaissance theology, the Jesuit John O’Malley, who contributes a postscript to the book, seems to find his conclusions broadly convincing, so they deserve to be examined closely. In Byzantine and early Italian art the infant Christ was customarily shown either in a loose robe or in swaddling ...”

“... team did not live to see their work in print. Most strange, however, is the virtual absence of Sir John Neale himself, explained (if that is the word) in a prefatory note by the present chairman of the Editorial Board. Criticism must be muted by these solemn signs of human evanescence. Vita brevis, labor longus: is it not almost indecent to question the value ...”

“... Book Week, and exhibitions in Hungary and abroad. This year, Ferenc tells me, it will put on three major exhibitions, of books from the DDR, from the Soviet Union, and of books published in French in Hungary, to tie in with a visit Mitterrand is soon to make to Budapest. Book Week is a national event, started in 1929 and held annually towards the end of ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured ...”

“... of Gagliano, where Carlo Levi stayed, had a saying, ‘Christ stopped at Eboli,’ the nearest major town, because the railway stopped there. But so had the Romans, the Greeks, the Goths and the Renaissance. And historians, too, stop at Eboli: most of what can be gleaned about this ‘other Europe’ comes from the fieldwork of anthropologists. The ‘kind ...”

“... According to John Ruskin, ‘in the work of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural.’ Not so in Marguerite Yourcenar’s world. She is renowned for her timeless narrative gift and lucid style, and she regards her books as defining that unfashionable thing, an ‘ideal of humanity ...”

“... threatened is not the big show but the welfare of the museum or gallery which is its host. Few major galleries can afford not to mount such shows, for the activity and ‘gate’ can be measured as ‘growth’ and shows attract the publicity which convinces both paymasters in government and private benefactors that the gallery deserves further ...”