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“... One​ thing everyone knows about Erik Satie is that he was an eccentric. There are many kinds of eccentric and Satie was most of them. He presented himself as a nutty professor figure, not a composer but a ‘gymnopedist’ and ‘phonometrician’. He dined – or so he claimed in his autobiography – only on ‘food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals ...”

“... was eight. Whitman’s father was, in the poet’s words, ‘manly, mean, angered, unjust’, and Melville’s was driven to suicide after failures in the market. The novelist’s rage was only in-creased by his supposed inability to mourn his father’s death, and this gets transfigured into the monomanaical vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the ...”

“... by fire; the Birthday play, perforce performed in a cinema, was, significantly, Coriolanus. Mrs Melville, wife of the vicar of Stratford, a self-confessed Fascist and anti-semite who vigorously opposed the inclusion of the Soviet flag at the Birthday ceremonies, was a governor of the Shakespeare Theatre and must therefore have had a hand in the choice of ...”

“... modernist ambition and postmodernist decentredness – a fake, perhaps, but an interesting one. As Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova’s’s superb book A Writer at War makes clear,* Grossman saw more of the war than any of them; more than any other writer. He volunteered to fight but, tubby and shortsighted and unathletic as he was, was sent instead to cover ...”

“... it would all come back and sweep me away. The performance was always conducted by the organist, Dr Melville Cook, in a fluent, almost boneless style with which I was familiar as it was also affected by Maurice Miles, the conductor of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. But the uncushioned pews were hard and the parish church, being Victorian, didn’t have much ...”