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“... me.’ Although he makes no mention of it, this is the fair but discouraging challenge that Arnold Silver has taken up. The ‘darker side’ alluded to by his title consists not, as Shaw himself might have expected, of the ‘crudely erotic’ but of the violent aspect of Shaw’s imagination. This is precisely the point where, I argued twenty ...”

“... He had everything going for him until the first crisis arose and the North blew up in 1969. Bruce Arnold has been a commentator on Irish political and cultural life for the past thirty years. He writes about politics using logic and reason, which is unusual in Ireland. He is able to write about certain Irish political figures with a respect which the rest of ...”

“... the outcome is a bit of a let-down, for he turns out – hang onto your hats – to be Matthew Arnold. ‘The 19th-century critic denounced the culture of his day in the name of something better, a more thoughtful and graceful culture,’ Jacoby approvingly notes. ‘Today most observers and scholars reject this as naive and élitist. In confounding ...”

“... on a candle. Let me watch the lighthouse rise out of shore-mist. Let me seek on uplands the grey-silver elegy of olives. This desire to be taken back and the images of ‘prophetic grief . . . Charge . . . concealed/in the sockets of these hills’, in the ‘parched trough of the Simeto’ clearly relate to the increasingly grievous troughs of belief in ...”

“... the story when the messenger of the gods hovers above the holocaust of London: ‘His helmet was silver, his body was glass, mercury filled his veins.’ The thermometer is an apt emblem for these stories, with its implications both of the feverish and of the clinical. The point of explosion towards which the temperature is constantly rising often takes a ...”

“... enough: On the day the war ended The sun laced through the avenues with lime-tree scent The silver birches danced on the sidewalk And the girls came out like tulips in their colours . . . Then the poem enlarges itself: ‘tanks, tamed elephants/Wallowed among the crowds in the square’. And then the cry: Only the soldier, snatched by the sudden ...”

“... to Craft from Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard are newly included. Letters (also to Craft) from Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, Glenn Gould and other musical luminaries are also published for the first time; and most of the illustrations are new. Gone are the itineraries that laboriously prefaced each chapter-year in the original edition and the ...”

“... magi-coal effect’ of the pile of bricks on which Brünnhilde reclined in Orange, or the ‘silver rabbit’s-ears helmet’ worn by Wotan.Wagner’s music-dramas placed impossible demands on theatrical machinery. The Festspielhaus created at Bayreuth in 1876, dedicated to the performance of his works, developed an array of novel special effects ...”

“... the Great entering Rome in triumph. In front of it was a double-trayed tea table with a monstrous silver tea set. It was in this room that my mother gave a weekly tea party to the most boring ladies of the haute Jewish bourgeoisie, which I was forced reluctantly to attend.Keeping the haute bourgeoisie happy was important because Peggy’s branch of the family ...”

“... the swamp, is, of course, a white, long-necked swamp-wading bird. I am here under false pretences. Arnold, the young man who picks me up from Union Island, a mile across the bay, seems mysteriously over-excited to see me, and asks in the launch: ‘You’re in the movies, aren’t you?’ I tell him I’m not. He insists; he knows he’s seen me in a movie. I ...”

“... the sullen Rose Dorn, third-grade femme fatale; Rose’s fiery end; the improbable friendship with Arnold Hasselstrom, inarticulate playground psychopath; the romantically tortured genesis of Cartoons, complete with feverish bouts of sleeplessness and nervous debility; Jeffrey’s urging of Edwin’s carefully plotted suicide (‘I aspire to the condition of ...”

“... successful, both critically and commercially. Benstock takes her title from a snatch of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Resignation’ copied by Wharton into her Commonplace Book in 1908: ‘They believe me, who await/No gifts from chance have conquered fate’. What Arnold is celebrating is that markedly Victorian duty to bustle ...”

“... secretary Tory Dennistoun is connected, like almost everyone else in the book, to her own silver-lined and gloriously inevitable parenthesis: ‘Tory Dennistoun (now Lady Oaksey)’. Suffering from a sebaceous cyst Betjeman attended the Acland Nursing Home, and ‘he was nursed there by the historical novelist Mary Renault,’ the lucky thing: the ...”

“... queen might represent the alchemical process of conjunction – the physical joining of gold and silver – or suggest an analogy for the mysterious and unseen bonds between substances, now envisioned in terms of human desire.’ Naked men and women, sometimes pictured in hexagonal stone baths, were used to represent substances undergoing dissolution or ...”

“... ceased to exert himself on behalf of his sister-in-law.Geoffrey’s great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby, which meant that Matthew Arnold was a great-uncle. Geoffrey was born in the spring of 1888 at Toxteth, where his father was principal of Liverpool College. His mother, one of the daughters of Thomas ...”