“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served as choirmaster and organist. Yet ...”

“... career as a Cold War strategist began in earnest when he was an undergraduate and later an MA student at McGill University in the late 1940s. He tangled often with the campus left, which remained sentimentally attached to Soviet communism. ‘I always felt that the coup – any coup – the manipulation, the getting at the levers of power, was ...”

“... The idea that Smith didn’t develop is a dull one regardless of whether it’s true or false (as John Bayley pointed out: ‘She never needed to do anything so banal as to “develop”, for the spectrum of tone continuously present is amazingly wide’). Despite his earlier criticism of her interest in cats Larkin’s later review singled out ‘The Singing ...”

“... view. And yet, for the next fifty years there were few reports on these seemingly uncharted lands. John Gunther’s bestselling 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud, about the death from cancer of his brilliant 17-year-old son, is a notable exception. Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty ...”

“... which she stuck them in: ‘Life with you could be incalculable.’ ‘I did not accept her as ma semblable.’ ‘Strike me pink.’It was only in Quicksands (2005), written when she was in her nineties, that Bedford attempted to extend her range beyond childhood and adolescence and Sanary in the 1930s, ‘a near decade of early adult life, a time I ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... piano duo of the 1950s and 1960s – virtuosic together in anything from Mozart to Poulenc and John Cage – seems oddly relevant here. Yes, it required the two of them to take Bernhardt on, rhetorically speaking; yet partnered thus, they also had between them enough nervy gay boy wit and fleet camp dexterity to keep the Divine One from blowing ...”

“... he had first tried out a new colloquial Bengali prose were included by Calcutta University in the MA paper in Bengali as specimens to be rendered by examinees into ‘chaste Bengali’. The Nobel Prize itself was the climax of a series of meetings and accidents. On board a ship to England in 1912, Tagore completed his translations of the metrically strict but ...”

“... twenty-three, the seven years that allowed first for the BA, then, for those who stayed on, the MA. Aristocrats and Roman Catholics went to the university earlier; sometimes much earlier; only eccentrics like Gabriel Harvey stayed for ever. These are the norms, and Hamlet’s intellectual youth, high in nuisance value, indicates that he adhered to these ...”

“... seeing someone, while the boys have a recurrent quibble about which of them is the girl – ‘Yer ma girl now,’ James says at one point – or exchange assertions of ‘Well, you are the woman,’ ‘You are.’ There’s no need for a balcony scene, since Mungo and James can see each other from the windows of their respective flats. James’s home ...”

“... it’s the fire that enables this liberation of desire, before extinguishing it: ‘Oh, Lawd, ma man’s dead,’ a black prisoner called Beautiful Slim says, mourning his lover. Yet death also has a levelling effect: Blackie, the white protagonist, observes that all the dead, white and black, have the same ‘smoke-blackened flesh’. In his ...”

“... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...”

“... ideas are ‘all sort of like little burps’. He now preferred the company of Chomsky and John Berger, who believed that ‘there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems.’ His own style became less cluttered and precious – more ‘transparent’ and ‘worldly’. He used it to demystify the ideology of Zionism in The Question ...”

“... on her lap. At a gathering of British psychoanalysts, students and academics organised by John Forrester in the 1980s the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche asked why there are no artistic representations of the erotic pleasure a mother gains in breastfeeding her child. Behind that question was another one. Why does the psychoanalytic representation ...”