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“... Do not believe the title. This book is scarcely a history, in the meaningful sense of that word, because although it is a collection of facts arranged in chronological order, it makes little attempt to assess them. Nor does it really treat of English opera, although there is ample information about theatres, librettists and composers. It is an obvious example of Hamlet without the Prince: in this case, music ...”

“... English musicology has always embraced the Big Bang theory, which is to say that musical history is the story of great composers. Tovey’s remark that there are Great Composers and there are Interesting Historical Figures sums it up quite well. The German school has for the most part believed in principles and (since its discipline was born in the times of Darwin) the development of the species – whether symphony, harmonic idiom or orchestration ...”

“... Even those of us who believe that the European Music Year is an invention of Saatchi and Saatchi can hardly deny that la generazione dell’ottantacinque was a formidable crew. How J.S. Bach, Handel and Domenico Scarlatti all came to be born in 1685 must be ascribed to chance; no juggling with the facts of cultural history can possibly account for it ...”

“... The machine grinds on and on. The sixth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians will come out next winter, all 20 volumes, 18,000 pages, 22,500 articles, 7,500 cross-references, over three thousand illustrations, over two thousand five hundred music-type examples – if the dust-cover of Percy Young’s biography of its founder is to be believed ...”

“... of musical history to be given in the British Imperial perspective. It was written for Wasps, says Denis Arnold, from a Waspish point of view and aimed at ‘a middle-class audience, whose children were choirboys, learned the piano and the organ, and prepared for the theory examinations of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music’. Bits of the ...”

“... But the motif survives that irony. Raine finds it most seriously in Henry James and Matthew Arnold; in James in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Private Life’, Washington Square and other fictions of the unlived life; in Arnold in his poem ‘The Buried Life’: And we have been on many thousand lines, And we ...”

“... with ‘some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their fellows’. Arnold had ‘his faith in what he described as the best thought of his generation’, Browning ‘his psychological curiosity’, Tennyson ‘moral values that were not aesthetic values’. But in the second or antinomian tradition, ‘Coleridge of the Ancient ...”

“... say a few words about Keats?’ Similarly he says a few words, not invariably silly, about Matthew Arnold, Pater, Cavafy, Lawrence, Gibbon, Kipling, and Edward Thomas: ‘I am prejudiced beyond all explanation against the poetry, prose, personality, and papa of Edward Thomas ... ’ But the most typical – not the liveliest – letter is one that arose from ...”

“... doing something new, he was doing something badly. ‘In the matter of historical fact,’ Denis Donoghue writes, joining in, as it were, ‘Pater also took liberties, so many that it is a pity he did not derive more satisfaction from them.’ But Pater was satisfied not by getting it wrong, but by not having to get it right. It was his style to affirm ...”

“... beds, he could not bring himself to do it himself. He brought in the magnificent, if always late, Arnold Goodman. Wilson won four elections in difficult times. His third and fourth governments were elected in unprecedently difficult times, but his Ministers felt themselves to be very experienced. Most of the leading people had served between 1964 and ...”

“... Time. After all, Blake was the only English poet noted in the Elegies, among Hölderlin, Goethe, Denis Saurat, Sorley MacLean, Dante and Ossian. Blake had written, ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau’; Henderson: Fuck on, fuck on, Verlaine, Rimbaud You blissful buggers; fuck again – For on my heart as on the town The small drops of your poems ...”

“... has been stated so insistently by modern critics that you would imagine they had invented it. But Arnold, Eliot, Leavis and other opponents have merely refined what Hazlitt said in 1821 and Mary Shelley said, among more laudatory things, in 1824. The gist of it is that Shelley’s sense of reality is immature. ‘His bending, flexible form,’ as Hazlitt put ...”

“... risk-taking that Steiner has in mind seem to refer to the attacks on his scholarship by Denis Mahon, but the logic of this argument is impossible to follow. Some close friends also supposed that Blunt must have got a kick out of danger, and Dadie Rylands, who knew him very well as a young man, noted that he liked to be ‘melted and tempted’ by ...”

“... After his dismissive biography of Mussolini and his scathing treatment of Italy’s royal family, Denis Mack Smith has turned back to a figure who fully engages his sympathies, and some may miss the darkly satirical tone of those earlier essays in denunciation. Mazzini is a work of passionate advocacy, which aims both to remind us of its subject’s enormous ...”

“... side. In Parliament, he was overtaken by younger men – George Brown, Jim Callaghan, even Denis Healey. When Labour returned to power in 1964, he was given the important, but hardly central, office of President of the Board of Trade. Three years later, he was brutally and unceremoniously sacked. Since then, he has hung on in politics as a backbencher ...”