“... Jerry Bruck which took apart the case for Alma’s ordering of the symphony – conductors such as James Conlon have reverted to playing the movements in the same order that Mahler did. It makes a huge difference, Conlon has written, to hear the ‘meditative beauty’ of the andante before the ‘acerbic, ironic’ scherzo. The assumption of the Lehrer song ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... However, to large swathes of the left, the idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for the city). Tories are comedy material, like Rik Mayall’s fictional creation of the late 1980s, Alan B’Stard MP. Googling ‘Tory MP’ throws up a rich array of associations, from ...”

“... of letters by Alexander Pope. He then hired someone, possibly the out-of-work actor and artist James Worsdale, to dress up as a clergyman and deliver to Curll by night some printed copies of Pope’s letters as well as some manuscripts. Curll duly advertised these and sold them under the title Mr Pope’s Literary Correspondence.As Claudio says in Measure ...”

“... extravagantly vulgar suffer from Sutherland’s sceptical attention. The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham (1895), by ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie), inspires the tough comment that it is ‘depressive and “sensitively” written (i.e. almost impossible to read), in the style fashionable in the 1890s’. Quotations are deployed ...”

“... that constitutions at home and abroad were unsettled – and that the Prince Regent seemed a Lord of Misrule: they did not know when the Great Reform Bill would be passed, as prologue to the stable reign of Victoria. In times like these, Abstract Ideas have great power. David Bromwich does (with proper suspicion) include one or two good anecdotes, to ...”

“... admirers would ever have called him an intellectual. Nor would that description have fitted Monty James. Nor A.C. Benson. But Benson understood what far more brilliant performers in the Classical grind failed to understand – that syntactical knowledge and command of prosody were not enough. He found Warre’s contempt for anything in the curriculum which ...”

“... Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public ...”

“... to Glasgow and his giant mass in Bellahouston Park. (She missed it by a year.) ‘There is one Lord,’ he said on that occasion, ‘one faith, one baptism, and one God who is father of us all, all over, through all and within all.’ She would have levitated with pleasure at that line, and the whole business of him saying it in Glasgow would have ...”

“... the weather has improved: here at the point of annihilation, all our brothers and sisters, We ask Lord God to acquit us all. Pound, too, at the end of his ‘personification’, gets Villon’s drift quite beautifully, in a prayer for the poet and his friends which draws directly on the same envoi: God damn his hell out speedily And bring their souls to his ...”

“... to head up the cosmeticians of cash, money make-over quangos. Welcome to the nouveaux aristos: Lord Rogers, Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Welcome, masters of spectacle: the designer Stephen Bayley and Ken Robinson (who Bayley glosses as ‘in charge of lavatories, parking, visitor flow’). Jobs for those who missed out on Channel 4, Arts Council ...”

“... final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and most lavish display of hospitality in 1575. Among ...”

“... And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (‘the Lord knows I tried’) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of ...”

“... power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to ...”

“... was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he ...”