Search Results

“... Brecht thought opera kulinarisch, a cooked-up business – a view that has been widely quoted without exerting much influence. Opera still dominates the kitchen of the performing arts in the Western world, imperiously consuming resources and insisting that it be kept properly dusted and aired. Its pretensions have not been reduced by the exigencies of Modernism, by media technology, or by the brutalities of recent history ...”

“... would Byron – he appears on the dust-jacket in Albanian national costume – have made of that? Rupert Christiansen’s Romantic Affinities is a very different affair – a guide to an age, inspired apparently by an understandable fit of summer glooms on marking A-level scripts on Romantic poetry: he wanted to write something more ‘romantic’ than ...”

“... and why people still behave in ways which are either disgusting or calamitous. The young critic Rupert Christiansen chose two good epithets to pinpoint his humour – blistering and terrifying. In ghost stories the teller of the tale is sometimes described as becoming aware that he is being observed by an invisible but hostile presence. So the reader ...”

“... and mischievous proprietor than Lord Beaverbrook, no more technically gifted editor than Arthur Christiansen, and few more celebrated reporters than the paper’s defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular ...”