“... of his death, Glenn Gould had become the subject of a novel, Der Untergeher by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Der Untergeher (literally ‘the sinker’ or ‘the one who goes, or is destined to go, under’ – perhaps ‘the loser’) describes the impact of Gould’s playing and personality on two exceptionally talented young Austrian pianists, who ...”

“... limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to ...”

“... Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at ...”

“... leading management books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter ...”

“... will be at best places where the work can be done rather than paying patrons. As long ago as 1959, William Charvat came to the reluctant conclusion that a comprehensive history of publishing was a mirage. What we would have to live with was a provisional and largely intuitive sense of the big picture, together with detailed accounts of the ...”

“... we know about her suggests that she was an exceptionally strong-minded and self-willed woman and William an exceptionally docile husband,’ one is bound to wonder just what it is that we do know. Is this Stone’s own – possibly stereotypical – view of male and female temperaments? Or is his interpretation influenced by the stereotypes of those male ...”

“... own election that silences, or ought to silence, any post-Movement tendency to scoff. Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now, is in observing how he shifts this way and that to ...”

“... a pragmatist who saw war as the test of manhood, and when Benda drew dubious comparisons between William James’s ‘will to believe’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. Yet at the time Benda’s book appeared, the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey was advocating pacifism and renouncing the nationalistic illusions that had led him to support America’s ...”

“... Only Place for Sex.’ After Paul’s arrival in Germany, this is confirmed by his second mentor William Bradshaw (Isherwood): ‘Everybody in Berlin is equal ... It all comes down to sex.’ Sexuality, in this view, is an egalitarian force. ‘Nakedness is the democracy of the new Germany,’ Paul reflects after he has been taken to the open-air swimming ...”

“... from the anarchy of black rule’. Birth of a Nation was based on a novel called The Clansman by Thomas Dixon (whose own persistent dream was ‘to prevent the lowering of the standard of our citizenship by its mixture with Negro blood’) and was first screened in 1915, by which date the Klan itself had been formally defunct for more than four decades and ...”

“... Rex Warner’s volumes of Greek myths and Noel Annan’s Leslie Stephen, as well as novels by Thomas Hinde and Colin MacInnes. There was also the peculiar satisfaction of publishing books right outside one’s ken. When we took on Great Horses of the Year, my ignorance of the turf was such that when one of my salesmen suggested that the bookmaker ...”

“... that is, it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New ...”

“... and a craving for absolute power’. The first wave of professional academic historians, notably William Stubbs and his pupil T.F. Tout, did much to illuminate the mechanisms of Richard’s rule but they found the conundrum of his personality hard to solve. Stubbs felt that Richard’s sudden imposition of autocracy in the summer of 1397, after nearly a ...”

“... triangular numbers favoured by the Tudors and Elizabethans. When Holbein drew Cecily Heron, Thomas More’s third and youngest daughter, during her first pregnancy in 1527, the fitted bodice of her square-necked gown, loosened to accommodate her bulging stomach, told its own story. (Both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour were described as ...”

“... diseases. ‘Know syphilis . . . and all things clinical will be added unto you,’ the great Sir William Osler had said. But it was vital to get things right. Drugs were available, but they were dangerous and expensive. In the untreated, symptoms could disappear quickly, as the organism went to ground, only to re-emerge randomly and unpredictably decades ...”