“... roses if they ordered them quietly. They had a few anxious months in 1932 when De Valera came to power, but it turned out that Dev was far more cordial to Trinity than his Free State rivals had been. The Free Staters wanted to let Trinity fend for itself, sell its plate if necessary, rather than reduce by a penny the money to be given to the colleges of the ...”

“... will probably hardly meet this aspect of his work, whereas in the old days Klenovsky (alias Sir Henry Wood), Stokowsky, not to mention Elgar, would have ensured a knowledge of at least some of the monumental toccatas and fugues in suitably brilliant orchestral versions. Handel seems to have been scarcely less fine, though his life did not encourage him to ...”

“... Duke of Sutherland’s estate in Surrey: mentioned in the Domesday Book and owned for a time by Henry VIII, it was older and more distinguished than Bend’Or’s Eaton. He lived there for the rest of his life. He had no idea of how to act like a peer. At Sutton Place, he enlarged his reputation for parsimony, especially when he had all the phones locked ...”

“... poor (for his Milk Can Escape Houdini was chained inside a giant churn). She compares Houdini to Henry Brown, the slave who in 1849 had himself shipped in a postal crate from his Virginia plantation to freedom in Philadelphia. Brown, too, was a showman: he turned the story of his escape into a theatre piece. As his show was to the black community, so ...”

“... and antis the indulgence of fratricidal intransigence in opposition. Labour’s return to power in 1974 made it much more difficult to fudge matters. But Wilson pressed on. The destination was far from enticing, at best a mushy compromise serving no greater or nobler end than to hold the party together. The going was gruelling, and an exasperated ...”

“... a ‘crude extravaganza’. The city was wresting itself from its surroundings, ‘the primal power assuming self-expression amid nature’s impelling urge’. Others were less sanguine about this conquest of nature. The novelist Hamlin Garland, visiting the city a decade after Sullivan had been there, wrote: ‘I perceived from the car window a huge ...”

“... account of his travels through western France, full of soppy Rousseauian paeans to the power of nature and sentiment (‘my heart overflows, my entire soul has plunged into an inexpressible rapture’). When the Revolution broke out, he dabbled in radical politics and tried his hand at literary journalism, but succeeded only in driving several ...”

“... with Soviet holidays, when the censor would be busy. This was letter-writing as a form of soft power. The Edwards-Aidov correspondence was published in 2006, long after the Soviet bloc had fallen and members of the two families had met, and the book – From Newbury with Love, edited by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter and Marina Aidova – is a reminder of a time ...”

“... exuberance, vitality and enthusiasm of their prose. Among Europeans, Signorelli, Samuel Palmer, Henry Moore and Dosso Dossi, in spite of his current £2 million price tag, don’t appear, but their absence is compensated for by the appearance of Bartholomäus Spranger and François Boucher. Behind any such encyclopedic enterprise as that of Honour and ...”

“... a friend, even when scattered, is scarcely pleasing. More charitable, but also more perturbed, was Henry Luxmoore, Monty’s tutor when he entered Eton as a boy, and at Eton still until he died in the eighth year of his old pupil’s Provostship. Luxmoore was austere but tolerant, and both qualities are evident in his account of a Christmas spent at King’s a ...”

“... indeed, a Spanish twist is an unlikely but integral feature of many of Sibelius’s tunes. Henry T. Parker’s Boston Evening Transcript review of the Fifth Symphony’s 1922 première in that city is worth attention for its handsome flush of Sibelius enthusiasm, presaging, as Tawaststjerna points out that of Cecil Gray, Gerald Abraham and Constant ...”

“... in the light of the Incarnation’. The aim of the rival and larger Christian Social Union led by Henry Scott Holland was to make Christian law the ultimate authority, to discover how the moral truths of Christianity might be applied to social and economic problems and to ‘present Christ in practical life as the Living Master and King’. At its height, the ...”

“... go’), today’s descendants of slaves seem fixated on the glamorous Pharaohs as symbols of power and conquest – to the point of denying the plight of those they held in bondage. Writing about Bernal, Howe emphasises the irony of his seeming excessively preoccupied with the ethnic origins of the scholars whose work he criticises, while, on the other ...”

“... by others: his work on cities owes much to Jane Jacobs, the story of scientific forestry to Henry Lowood, and so on. But it is in making the general case that Scott comes unstuck, for the studies do not illustrate a common theme. Some of them do indeed illustrate the damage done by Modernist aesthetics, but not all of them, and in any case Scott does ...”

“... troubadour the jouncy poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the very gates of Hell.’ This Orphic power faces both ways, towards the illusionist magic of performance and the bad faith of faith. Early on in the novel, Rai quotes from the libretto for Gluck’s Orpheus, which gives the story a happy ending – ‘E quel sospetto/Che il cor tormenta/Al fin ...”