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“... merely a quarter of a fifth of those so far available, but one would not want the volume longer. William Walton is no prose stylist, not much of an anecdotalist, and his letters reveal remarkably little about him. They are nearly always utilitarian – money, advice, favours to be sought, contracts to be finalised, parts to be corrected, a libretto to ...”

“... Susana Gil alighted upon the gossip circuit of musical Europe as a living anachronism. ‘By God, William is going to marry a native,’ said one of Walton’s friends when the eminent composer’s Buenos Aires flag-showing trip in 1948 turned into a fishing expedition. It wasn’t only her youth and insouciance that ...”

“... British records are as follows: 1. 1785, month unknown. Shot near Wingham in Kent, at the seat of William Hammond, Esq.; sent to the ornithologist Dr John Latham, author of A General Synopsis of Birds (1781-1801). 2. 1793, month unknown. Shot in North Wales by George Kingston of Queen’s College, Oxford; became part of the collection of the botanist Dr John ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”

“... the great (Diaghilev, the Sitwells), one is often keener to learn of the luck his rival and friend William Walton was having. Walton’s history lurks in the shadows of the Lambertian narrative, and his more succulent achievement stimulates the greater curiosity. As for George Lambert’s overall failure, Motion himself ...”

“... held the attention – the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently ...”

“... reviews ‘while they were poring over the latest score from Lords or the Oval’. Later, when William Walton went to see Diaghilev about the possibility of a commission, Lambert went along too and played through his own ballet Adam and Eve, which Diaghilev liked but insisted on retitling Romeo and Juliet, on the grounds that one could hardly ...”

“... continued to his death, can be tested when compared with its lack in his nearest English rival, William Walton, born 11 years before him. Walton’s career began in brilliance and ended in conformity. Britten told Walton that hearing the latter’s Viola Concerto, in 1931, was a ...”

“... Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double ...”

“... Owen’s poems into print in her magazine, Wheels. With Façade, devised in collaboration with William Walton and first produced in 1922, she invented something new, a kind of Symbolist/Futurist performance poetry. Like her appearance, indeed her entire life, Façade treads fearlessly the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Greene seems ...”

“... open-necked blue shirt – the anthropologist Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne, Stephen Spender and Sir William Walton. Conversely, almost all the women pictured in the book expose neck dimples, if not deep décolletage. Those who do not, whether the Duchess of Windsor in a triple-pearl choker, Dorothy Sayers in a mannish coat and tie or Margaret Thatcher in ...”

“... Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the outstanding ...”

“... Prior, Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas ...”

“... On a June night in 1917, in his home at Walton Heath in Surrey, the Prime Minister asked to be roused at 3 a.m., because there was something he did not want to miss: the big bang from afar which would signify that British sappers had blown the top off the German-held Messines ridge. The sound came through on schedule ...”

“... interrogated and no doubt threatened with torture. He swiftly broke. The man he had been hiding, William Harrington, might have held out against his questioners, but Henry’s testimony did for him; in February 1594, he was tried, convicted of treason, and hung, drawn and quartered. Henry himself was already long gone. Transferred to a filthy cell in the ...”