“... beautiful and rich Irish-born musician, Augusta Holmes (or Holmès). As Raitt surmises, Villiers may himself have had hopes of Judith, and possibly of Augusta too, in which case he could well have felt that his friend was getting the best of both bargains. Nonetheless, together with Leconte de Lisle (such choice names!), he attended the wedding as one of ...”

“... dismissal of Ted Kennedy’s future, like so many perfectly reasonable historical prophecies, may be premature. Kennedy electrified the Democratic Party’s otherwise sallow mini-convention this summer; scarcely a week later, he left the National Association of Colored People’s annual meeting on its feet, cheering. Wills quotes one of John Kennedy’s ...”

“... VIP in the propaganda team: ‘Do you mean I am free now?’‘Why, yes,’ she was smiling.‘May I go home right now?’‘Yes, do.’ She was a bit surprised.I started running towards the gate when I heard the woman calling behind me: ‘Comrade! Comrade! Your things!’I only waved in answer for I was choked with tears. ‘Comrade’ is the most common ...”

“... good grades. The fact that a number of his superiors were ready to believe that he was a traitor may very well denote anti-semitism, but also important was the fact that he was from Alsace (as were a great many of the officers involved in the Affair). His family fortune was based in Mulhouse, which had been annexed to Germany. It was there that his brother ...”

“... and sweat and aching feet, of bouquets and the smell of resin and the sound of applause: you may get the feel of the theatre and the rehearsal room, but rarely the feel of dancing. Nijinska explains exactly how she conceived a role, and then how she set about realising her conception, step by step, movement by movement; how she discovered special ...”

“... his habit of retaining all the abbreviations and original punctuation in 15th-century texts. There may be a case for doing so with manuscripts, although it does not conform to modern practice, but to reproduce 27 lines of Latin exactly as it was printed in 1472 is unnecessarily hard on the reader, especially when he is then told that the passage is ...”

“... the girl from whom I had hired the car had spoken about the town with such despair. For me it may have been thronged with ghosts (and even a ghost, one couldn’t help thinking, would have difficulty in surviving amid those flat, meagre streets, on that sandy soil, under that high sky); for her it was just dead. ‘You know: dead!’ Her name was ...”

“... Viennese: the only actual Viennese in the so-miscalled First Viennese School was Schubert. You may say that there is a point in speaking, purely musically, of Viennese symphonism – in which case, however, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is one of its most outstanding products. And why not? Tchaikovsky’s spiritual teacher was Mozart – and that’s the ...”

“... fiction. The first principle of essay-writing is that, whatever or whoever the ostensible subject may be, the personality the reader remains most aware of is that of the essayist. Gilliatt, who is so painstakingly aware of the small details in her composition, seems surprisingly unaware of the largest feature – namely, herself. No question for her of the ...”

“... too narrow a denotation (in the strictly logical sense, meaning the ‘aggregate of objects that may be included under’ the word ‘secession’) that produces the gravest factual error, which is one of indefensible omission. That is to say, while Paret does not forget the secessions of Dresden, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Weimar, while two Swiss ...”

“... generous Britain cannot supply an adequate demonology, nor an intense enough irritation. And it may be that Sharpe has written too much without pause, preserving himself in the Decline and Fall/Vile Bodies phase of his work. As he has switched to British settings, Sharpe’s black beasts have been twofold. First, institutions of learning: both the old, like ...”

“... courtiers of Japan a thousand years ago can still move the reader. Secondly, strange as it may seem, The Tale of Genji provides a way of understanding an aspect of present-day Japan. The Japanese sense of national identity is intimately linked to the people’s identification with the literature of the past. In a nation where the secondary-school ...”

“... as fiction always must be for O’Connor, out of believable materials. Its logic requires that Mrs May end up symbolically raped and then killed (it is all one continuous act) by a loose bull on her farm – not even a registered ‘gentleman’ bull, either, but a scrub belonging to her tenant’s sons. It is not the hardness of Christian realism that ...”

“... wars of the 19th century it had provided the country with its only effective government. It may not, in fact, be quite so old as the liberal general Gutierrez Mellado and David Gilmour seem to think – like most European armies it is, in its present form, principally a creation of the late 18th century – but its sense of being the defender, not only ...”

“... as conscientiously as the hawks who descended on its favourite son. It seems these inventions may have been a reaction against the death of the other son, whom Elvis spoke to throughout his life and whose place his mother regularly set at the table. The Who provided unlimited material for gossip, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who graduated from ...”