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“... county’s most famous native son. The annual Aldeburgh Festival, which he and his partner Peter Pears founded, was in many ways scrupulously communitarian, involving local halls, churches and craftsmen. But many felt that Britten ran it with iron caprice, surrounded by a gang of insiders, quickly dismissing those who fell out of favour. Warm, simple, even a ...”

“... a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... lead in Darling, before Julie Christie came along. She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but her pictures weren’t: most ...”

“... as he is about to scramble it, it hatches and the chick flies away. Geppetto gives Pinocchio the pears he has been saving for his own breakfast. When Pinocchio demands that they be peeled, Geppetto is shocked at his ‘fastidious’ palate: ‘In this world, even as children, we have to learn to eat anything and everything, and to like it.’ After Pinocchio ...”

“... or books we have read. To go to a shop armed with a scrap of paper that says ‘eggs, milk, pears’ is to believe that you have a script and are the one in charge, even if you end up getting apples instead because the pears look bad. Jonathan Meades is a writer who understands the power of lists. In An Encyclopedia ...”

“... at Morley College in South London, where he staged regular concerts and hired the tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s partner, to sing the solo parts in music by Orlando Gibbons. Tippett and Britten had much in common. They were both keen to steer British music away from what they perceived as the folksy whimsy of Vaughan Williams, and had instead immersed ...”

“... do. But so also do a collection of people whom I’ve never seen before, and in such numbers that David Hyde Pierce, who is presenting it, is practically elbowed out of the way. These turn out to be the backers who, of course, have every reason to be pleased and indeed one of them duly adjusts my tie. I am then bundled out through a back door and across the ...”

“... couple (or artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G story!’ And ...”

“... excitedly as he reads – as he always used to. A still from Tacita Dean’s film portrait of David Hockney (2016) Dean clearly has an affinity with old men. Her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was full of them. She visits the elderly Michael Hamburger at his Suffolk farmhouse with her movie camera, zooming in on the wonky doorways, the ...”

“... I enjoy watering the beans and tomatoes, picking spinach and herbs and roses, and listening to the pears dropping. This enclave of affluence sits more or less midway between the Brixton Road and the Clapham Road – hence, I suppose, the locking and timing devices. No doubt there’s much to be said, and not all of it simply wishful, about working-class ...”

“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”

“... itself, or on its musical realisation, or even on the performers, but on what Ruth Berghaus or David Alden or Andrei Serban is saying about it. Or rather what images they are inflicting upon it – for the production of opera is primarily a matter of what something is made to look like. Singers rarely have any authentic acting ability and the wiser ...”

“... rough unities – a chapter arranged around his mother, a chapter touching on English themes from Pears soap to imported tutors, a lepidoptery chapter, another about journeys abroad, and so on – but the Kuropatkin interlude serves only to show how difficult it is to achieve such perfect symmetry. And perhaps also how undesirable this might be on a large ...”

“... on Day 167 of the Sizewell Inquiry. In the huge auditorium, indelibly associated with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Mr Justice Layfield presided over an inquiry the minutes of which were a lawyer’s dream. How they wallowed in it! Every detail of every pipe of every set of tubes seemed to be dissected. I came away doubting whether this form of ...”