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“... such overture, is further new material – though there he would have been eclipsed by Britten. Bliss he pokes fun at – a ‘moustachioed cod-fish’, ‘Arturo pomposo’. As for Elgar, whom he generally admired, it was to avoid being ‘done in by old Elgar’s No. 3’ (the symphony he did not manage to write) that Walton was ‘fired’ to complete ...”

“... I liked my chances.Although I was born in Los Angeles and spent my earliest years in the Arcadian bliss of Coldwater Canyon, where my father had built a house, I’d never been back as an adult. I had also never had a first-class air ticket, never written a full-length screenplay and never been met at the airport by someone handing over $500 in cash. Because ...”

“... thing of beauty is a joy for ever’) leads on to a description of the ‘breathless honey-feel of bliss’. After dropping out from University College London, Aldington became the lover of Brigit Patmore, a strikingly beautiful woman ten years his senior who was married to a philandering insurance man. She knew many writers in London, including the recently ...”

“... ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald ...”

“... The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care for Richard, his version of ...”

“... been in love a good many times,’ he told his readers in 1938, ‘I have never experienced the bliss of requited love . . . I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me.’ The couple sat out the Second World War in America, where Maugham wrote The Razor’s Edge (1944) while Haxton carried on drinking despite contracting tuberculosis. He ...”

“... and the formal, distant way they are named that this won’t be a story of domestic harmony and bliss. The next image adds to the sense of dislocation: we are told that before the narrator’s grandfather Edmund Foster ‘put us down in this unlikely place’, he grew up ‘in the Middle West, in a house dug out of the ground, with windows just at earth ...”

“... freakier, possibly, were the pleasures to be found in Bosch’s world – the surreal salamander-bliss depicted in the eponymous Garden and beyond. Strangest of all: the fact that outlandish things were happening – all over the painting – but that nobody, even in hell, looked to be particularly tormented. Indeed, some of the little naked human figures ...”

“... must have interested Wilde. He could have fun with Dorian. For example, when he blackmails Alan Campbell at the end of the book, it’s clear that he is threatening to expose him as a homosexual. Wilde could also, for the most part, leave women out of his book, or treat them as less than human. The crucial difference between Wilde’s book and ...”