“... 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 ...”

“... and grand denunciations of human villainy; they are notable social documents; and whatever we may think of the biographical fallacy, their connection with the mystery of Traven will give them a lasting place in literary history. But are they the work of a major writer? I think not. Traven’s place is probably that which Somerset Maugham assigned to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... frame, or if you know you won’t be able to string together enough pots to make a high score, you may be tempted to play a safety shot by putting as much distance as possible between cue ball and object ball, or even to ‘snooker’ your opponent by obscuring the ball they need to hit behind another one. The surface of the table, usually made of a single ...”

“... embody the barbarism of peoples invading the Roman Empire.Alternatively the historical narrative may be one of decline, with the human lifespan providing a model – youth, maturity, ageing. In the early 19th century the English architectural antiquary Thomas Rickman looked at the changing styles of medieval Gothic windows and came up with the terms ‘Early ...”

“... They also knew that an attack needed good weather and calm seas. No attempt had been made in late May, when heat records were shattered in the South of England, and German officials were confident that there wouldn’t be an invasion in early June either. The German forecasters told high command that there would be rain and gale-force winds in the English ...”

“... jazz – that allowed one to jump and move quickly across planes of understanding’. This may be a reference both to Walter Benjamin’s ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ and to a well-known C.L.R. James essay, which quotes Lenin’s emphatic repetition of the word ‘LEAP’ when reading Hegel’s Logic. As James paraphrases, ‘the new thing LEAPS ...”

“... height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only ...”

“... its wheat and wheat flour’, despite having only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Malthus may well have helped build the infrastructure of this empire, but he would have been horrified by the way it enabled Britain to live beyond its means and to ignore a natural law designed to stimulate not gluttony, but self-reliance and restraint.Neo-Malthusians ...”

“... appeared in 2023 and was longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. The novel may remind English readers, in different ways, of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (the relationship with the domineering father, the unchanged names, the treatment of time, the reflections on memory, art and writing) or Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend ...”

“... Press and Media Foundation, and that the 2022 election was ‘not free, let alone fair’. In May 2023, a delegation of members of the European Parliament concluded that Hungary’s audit system was inadequate and that the government was using public funds to ‘enrich the family and friends of Viktor Orbán’.The resignation of the conservative ...”

“... botanical name was attached. No matter how many revolutions biological classification systems may undergo – and they have undergone several since Linnaeus’s time, from a basis in morphology to phylogeny to cladistics to DNA – the type specimen and the plant name remain bound. The dried plants, each carefully flattened onto a sheet of paper, are ...”