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“... creative decisions. Breuning’s memoir paints an intimate portrait of Beethoven’s domesticity: Lewis Lockwood to a striking extent domesticates Beethoven’s genius, which is now revealed as less an unknowably sublime phenomenon than a matter of hard practicality, of a last-minute deletion on the autograph or a superadded bit of scrawl. Reading about ...”

“... The mood at Batts is one of desultoriness, torpor, ennui. Shortly before Edward’s arrival, Lewis Gibson, best man at Edward and Laurel’s wedding, observes Janet drift across the lawn, where her father lies fast asleep in a deckchair. Janet’s hand moves slowly across the back of the chair, without touching it. ...”

“... to the end (she died aged 94 in 2003), Elsie’s criterion for female beauty remained Margaret Lockwood, Hitchcock’s other early star (so good in The Lady Vanishes), whose top eyelids were sootily shadowed, mascara’d and lined, but whose lower lids remained untouched. Elsie’s eyeliner days were long behind her; her grooming consisted of Pond’s Cold ...”

“... a misconception. The personality of Nicholas Jenkins is inseparable from its power. By no means a Lockwood or Marlow, or even – perhaps the nearest, if still quite distant, precedent – Nick Carraway, he is fully present as the actor on whom the story is centred in the first four instalments of A Dance, which form a classic Bildungsroman embedded in the ...”