“... on when Pasmore discusses his part in the planning of Peterlee New Town, and the pavilion over the lake there, which ‘became a sort of pop hooligan’s paradise. They made a terrible noise in it and wrote graffiti on the walls.’ He went there with worried members of the Corporation, some of the dismayed locals, and the press. ‘I told them that this was ...”

“... instead of casting a shadow over us, will exist only in the shadow cast by our search for origins. Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson’s thorough survey of fictions of Englishness casts a shadow of this kind. It rests on a theory of the relation between literature and ideology developed in the 1970s: the function of ideology ...”

“... 66 seems close to some lines by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) translated by Marcus Perryman and Peter Robinson on page 38: but is there really an echo? If so, which way does it run? And is it in the originals or only in the translations? The Italian is not given so we cannot tell. The only gesture towards anchoring the poems in Italy is that each poet’s ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... she settled with Michael, Nina and Ollo in an idyllic farmhouse in the mountains, overlooking Lake Geneva. She constructed a radio, and at the end of September, heard about Munich on the BBC news and knew it meant war not peace. If​ a novelist were inventing this story, they might now consider having Kuczynski plot to kill Hitler, before rejecting the ...”

“... perhaps a small formal garden, an orchard, a summerhouse. There’s a river nearby, or possibly a lake, ideal for a swim first thing. There are woods of oak and birch, and water meadows. The floors are oak. A handful of rooms are heated by wood-burning stoves, and it’s sparsely furnished. There aren’t many distractions: no ...”

“... String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s ...”

“... stand by and pretend that she didn’t care, not just for her own sake, but for mine. Her husband, Peter, was well liked by the hardnut, Rangers Club toughs and, if our affair was ever discovered, she knew exactly what would happen to us both – especially to me. Still, whatever the emotion was that I had seen in her face, it quickly melted away as she nodded ...”

“... the Chandler-scripted Blue Dahlia and two more Marlowe films – Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, and the Hawks/Faulkner/Bogart/Bacall Big Sleep – Chandler was rich and famous. Under the pressure of Hollywood social life and the Wilder collaboration (which Hiney calls Chandler’s first close human contact with anyone other than Cissy in a decade), he ...”

“... era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter Hall and Götz Friedrich broke down. Tooley dutifully chronicles the years from 1947 to 1988, but only comes alive in his final 80 pages, with a disgruntled assessment of his successor. Isaacs for his part is critical, if not harshly so, of Tooley. He ...”

“... a huge leap from the ‘dauntless master’ of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to Peter Porter among the ‘takeaways’, ‘civic galleries’ and ‘cement escarpments’ of Rusholme. When the history of indebtedness comes to be written, quirkier contributions will be charted: Eberhart’s gift to Geoffrey Hill; Muldoon’s ‘Immram’ as a ...”

“... with the feast of colour in the gallery. ‘Emerging from Turner’s heliocentric cathedral,’ Peter Conrad wrote in the Observer, ‘I felt I had cataracts: it takes time to re-accustom your dazzled eyes to the wan, monochrome mock-up we call reality.’ Turner, and his great advocate Ruskin, would surely have sighed with impatience at these ...”

“... than Lincoln Kirstein’s report on his conducting of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake at the New York Met in 1949: ‘Marvellous music, exquisitely played by Lambert, a divine conductor, the greatest ballet man in the business.’ Lambert had ‘a genius for tempi,’ Kirstein thought, ‘absolutely on the note in every variation; no boring ...”

“... embassies in the 1690s, became a bestseller, cited by Kant and Goethe. Later accounts by Carl Peter Thunberg and Phillip Franz von Siebold kept curiosity alive. But since no one else could go, Westerners continued to depend on sources that were decades out of date. Then, just as Edo opened its doors, it changed its name and began a rapid transformation ...”

“... met Princess Margaret ... yet?’ At Quentin’s we grew used to finding Koestler, Bernard Levin, Peter Sellers, Ken Tynan, Keith Richards – but none of these quite counted as in her league. As Quentin observes here, with a pretence of puzzlement, ‘even in supposedly relaxed and liberal circles, very few managed to behave normally with ...”