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“... Byrd was to 16th-century European music what Arnold Schoenberg was in the 20th century, but it is Benjamin Britten who makes for a more interesting comparison. There is that combination of pugnacity (seen in Byrd’s case at Lincoln Cathedral and in his lifetime of litigation) and an extraordinary capacity for deep friendship. Byrd’s career was ...”

“... is too musical to stick to his extra-musical subject: what his deeply understanding article on Benjamin Britten has to do with politics, for instance, would be difficult to say. Deeply, rather than widely understanding: ‘you can detect an emphatically non-Continental musical thinking; no trace of the Vienna School, not even of its traditionalistic ...”

“... of Harper’s Bazaar, and for a while housed such diverse inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially terrible housemate, complaining about excessive use of toilet paper and telling people their colds weren’t physical but mental.) Carson was ...”

“... is an interesting experiment and was laudably undertaken by Donald Mitchell in his interview with Benjamin Britten conducted at the time of Owen Wingrave’s composition. Small adjustments even here, I gather, were made. But the tiniest adjustment, strictly speaking, disqualifies a transcript from verbatim status, and obliges the transcriber to form a ...”

“... Day 167 of the Sizewell Inquiry. In the huge auditorium, indelibly associated with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Mr Justice Layfield presided over an inquiry the minutes of which were a lawyer’s dream. How they wallowed in it! Every detail of every pipe of every set of tubes seemed to be dissected. I came away doubting whether this form of planning ...”

“... Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox ...”

“... After the war Menuhin did not just hurry to play in Berlin: he played in Belsen (accompanied by Benjamin Britten) only a week after it had been liberated (they gave over thirty concerts in and around the camp). ‘Nothing could have prepared us, psychologically or visually, for what we found,’ Menuhin recalls, and the experience scarred him for ...”

“... of the 1920s, with young Willie Walton not fitting into the Prince Consort Road, and then with Benjamin Britten, who can be seen as the equivalent of the Thirties poets. The study (too long for its subject, but full of interesting insights) stops before English music was dragged into the 20th century, squealing rather than screaming, by Sir William ...”

“... room of the club, Stephen said, pointing with two fingers at a table across from us: ‘There’s Benjamin Britten.’ Against the light from the window, I saw a man with dense curly grey hair talking with someone at his table. Stephen kept looking toward him, but Britten never looked our way. As we were leaving the ...”

“... spent mainly in Mexico and New York, where they took up residence at 7 Middagh Street with Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Co. The book includes only a handful of letters from the period 1938 (when they married) to 1947, during which time Jane Bowles – immeasurably the greater writer – composed just about her entire oeuvre. The marriage ...”

“... In the preface to the decennial volume for 1971-80, John Lennon was singled out, along with Benjamin Britten, as One of the two most distinguished new entrants from the field of music, but it remains true that there has been very little attempt to memorialise popular musicians who during their lives were household names. With the arguable exception ...”

“... literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar at the time – and tenanted by Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem consists of a monologue by each of these. Like ‘Immram’ and ‘The more a man has the more a man ...”

“... was more time for a circle of friends that included the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Noël Coward and Benjamin Britten. As time and death thinned the old guard she made new friendships, notably with Ted Hughes, arranging to split the laureate’s traditional allowance of sherry with him. Amid the fun there was an inevitably growing number of letters of ...”

“... and that stretches to the writings of Elizabeth Bowen and to Peter Grimes, the opera with which Benjamin Britten returned from the States to England in 1942 – we encounter sensibilities thoroughly au fait with European modernism who nonetheless adopted the passion for the particular that is the hallmark of Romanticism. That is how Harris responds to ...”

“... Brooklyn household, where, among others regularly passing the (obligatory) potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee. When love comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held ...”