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“... erotic humour … Finally, facetiousness, honest to its own failing.’ She is writing here about Thomas Mann). And she did it when she spoke, shifting pitch and tone and precise degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the ...”

“... Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it ...”

“... alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the cathedral, we loved to squeeze out those acute ...”

“... the glamour they exuded – the young Bob and Maude were as tall and beautiful, everyone said, as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – their 27-year marriage was a union made in hell: the full-bore, martini-sloshing Wasp nightmare. Hutchins’s biographers – worshipful to a man – place most of the responsibility on Maude. She had no interest in the ‘parochial ...”

“... Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an ...”

“... which, not being especially carnivorous, we find it hard to dispose of. This year, though, Inigo Thomas, having been brought up on such fare, has offered to take them off our hands (and later sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling ...”

“... this lesson or transaction taking place in beer advertisements in all our countries.) The Clarence Thomas hearings, when the public had to watch the all-male Senate Committee browbeating Anita Hall, provided American women with an object lesson in their powerlessness. That that object lesson occurred was a subject of distress to the establishment, which needs ...”

“... offensive in the desert war; in the Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott; the British Embassy with its immaculate lawn sloping down to the edge of the Nile; the Turf Club, an all-male establishment lifted straight from Pall Mall.And there was the Gezira Sporting Club, a vast pleasure ground occupying the southern half of ...”

“... packet before sending it on again, so each publisher could see the story of its rejection) until Thomas Newby accepted Emily and Anne’s books, though they would have to pay £50 for the pleasure, to be returned if 250 copies were sold. Charlotte sent out The Professor again, and after a kinder than usual rejection note from Smith, Elder & Co, saying they ...”