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“... and Professions in Gujarat’, and looked back on his earlier collaboration with the likes of Edward Moor in exposing such practices as female infanticide, which he claimed was particularly common among the Jadeja Rajputs of Gujarat. Walker, like many others, was inclined increasingly as his career progressed to see Indian society as made up not of ...”

“... the ceremony Their plan was to use a Spanish honeymoon as cover for an assassination attempt on Edward VII, who was visiting Gibraltar, but MacBride instead got drunk in Algeciras. The editors describe this dereliction as ‘the final blow’ to Maud in a honeymoon ‘that from the start had not been auspicious’. In defence of MacBride. I suppose it might ...”

“... he was given a knighthood and the OM; he was swept up into the arms of the Establishment; even Edward VII recognised a good tune when he heard one. By 1911, Elgar was one of the most famous men in the land: the hoped-for glory had come. But in 1920, Alice died, and Elgar the composer died with her. As the last verse of ‘The Music ...”

“... so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of Balcarres, a junior title that did not bar him from the House of Commons. To unravel his pedigree, as his forbears ...”

“... the Kaiser would die of throat cancer. He also claimed the Liberal Government had killed King Edward VII. David Gilmour, who does the best he can to defend Kipling against his detractors, insists that some of this was not intended ‘personally’, but it is hard to see how that could be. In fact Kipling comes over as a deeply unsympathetic character in ...”

“... no less, entitled A Guest of Honour. Even today, it has the air of a massive cultural oxymoron. Edward Berlin speculates that the libretto may celebrate Theodore Roosevelt’s politically dangerous invitation to a black man – the celebrated educationalist, Booker T. Washington – to dine at the White House. Styled a ‘ragtime opera’, A Guest of Honour ...”

“... but frequently more discursive than some might think the occasion requires, as when the late Edward Said is chastised at length for his errant opinion of A Passage to India. Forster’s devotees, a party that includes the present editor, are clearly unwilling to treat the paralipomena of an admired author as undeserving of the fullest canonical ...”

“... of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all? This is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead ...”

“... sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth sibling, James, has a son called Edward, though his biological father might actually have been Thomas. The family firm, General Roll, deals in player pianos and the punched paper rolls they require. There are assets involved, liabilities and potentially power struggles of the sort familiar from ...”

“... far too swift and almost magical about the opera for it to represent a political process. Unlike Wagner or even Mozart, Beethoven was neither particularly well-read nor philosophically inclined. He read the great contemporary poets like Schiller and Goethe, but when it came to philosophical ideas or how to think about history, he was more or less a ...”

“... interests of free speech his critics should stop trying to sniff out moral wrongdoing. But when Edward Moxon pulled the book, Swinburne stood firm. ‘To alter my course or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except ...”

“... to acknowledge her contribution to the biographical material in the last four chapters.’ Linda Wagner-Martin’s 1988 biography* reveals typographically, to anyone who examines it closely, that many passages were rewritten at a late proof stage, presumably under duress. Earlier attempts to write about Plath were either soured by authorial complaints ...”

“... Debussy was continually at war with the fusty theoreticians of the Conservatoire. His biographer Edward Lockspeiser records a remarkable conversation between Debussy and his old composition teacher, Ernest Guiraud, in which Guiraud plays a sequence of simple parallel chords and asks Debussy how he would ‘get out of this’ (manage it, that is, as harmony ...”

“... Singer was released the year Duncan died). Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she did, Duncan couldn’t imagine dancing on film without it. But more than that, the absence of archival footage, she said, would ensure that future generations remembered her ‘as a legend’. She ...”

“... Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous swells. They looked rather similar, something like Edward Elgar, and when they were in the House of Commons they worked together in a spirited, efficient and defiantly independent manner, never as lobby-fodder. Neither could be called ‘democratic’ or ‘anti-racist’; but Tap Bowles was always keen to praise ...”