“... novel, Tonkünstlers Leben, in which the composer-hero dreams himself transported to a concert hall, where a furious orchestral argument is taking place: All of a sudden the property man entered the hall, and all the instruments crept nervously back to their places, for they were aware that it was his rough hand that ...”

“... of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes. Up speaks real Oxbridge voice, while duly patronising to Auty – not ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward ...”

“... friar), best-known for his image of the recapture of Bahia from the Dutch, painted for the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro palace, but shown here to have been a gifted painter of sacred scenes as well. Another relatively neglected artist whose importance is stressed here is Juan Sanchez Cotan, whose Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber ...”

“... with edges where tone meets tone. In their detailed account of the ceiling of the staircase hall at Würzburg, Alpers and Baxandall analyse the most commanding example of this talent for the elliptical and the unresolved. The light changes from hour to hour and season to season; the view of the painting changes as the viewer mounts the staircase. They ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What was Taylor’s youthful fling with ...”

“... is that I didn’t actually see it except on YouTube, because Labour wouldn’t let me into the hall to watch the speeches (the party didn’t seem to think the LRB was a ‘relevant media outlet’), and I couldn’t get near any of the relays, and the internet was hopeless, which is the reason, I guess, all the bigger news teams brought their own. Even ...”

“... volume there is a poem called ‘It’s hard to dislike Ewart’. Too true, as Clive James or Peter Porter might say, possibly with a certain wry exasperation. Generally speaking, our fondness and admiration for poets does go with a potential of patronage or dislike, a pleasure in our sense of the absurdities and vulnerabilities of their worlds – Keats ...”

“... Cabinet? Sometime in the spring of 1967, I trudged along to a protest meeting at Oxford Town Hall. The line-up was of the sort summarised by the phrase ‘stage army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on ...”

“... It entitled me to the secret hoard of bananas that were kept in the cool and musty larder off the hall, whose darkness and echoey flagstone floor, a few steps down from ground level, spooked me sufficiently that I never dared to go there alone. The mice, who scurried over the draining boards in the kitchen, made their headquarters in the larder. In wartime ...”

“... make women free. Not all women, of course – someone would have to staff the communal eating-hall, a matter which did not worry Gilman, whose élitism, racism and commitment to eugenics give Allen pause. Gilman wanted a world which would be right for people like herself. Allen’s book shows she had reason to believe the one she had been born into did ...”

“... J. P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George’s platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – ‘five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’ – was fit to bring the house down. He was the politician as ...”

“... is angrier about his father’s remoteness. ‘With my parents, it wasn’t just the pram in the hall which was the enemy of promise. My parents didn’t want the pram anywhere in the house.’ Certainly, Thomas seems to have found fatherhood difficult: ‘How can no one be a father to someone?’ he had wondered in Neb, a sentence that might have been ...”