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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 ...”

“... Her father was an Austrian Jewish doctor and her mother a French Catholic. She studied under Arnold Schoenberg as a young pianist and singer. ‘If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence,’ she said, ‘it was Schoenberg.’ After her father’s death from cancer, in 1926 the family moved to Paris. By the early 1930s she had abandoned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the homosexuality and communism of the Cambridge spies, but weren’t Gilbert Murray and Arnold Toynbee more representative interwar figures and just as ‘incorporated’ as their postwar counterparts? Since conscription was universal during the Second World War, did war service really make Oxford and Cambridge dons so much more ‘worldly’ than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Swiss Open in Gstaad, where he was defeated in straight sets by the Argentine veteran Lucas Arnold Ker. ‘It never crossed my mind that “This guy is going to be great,”’ Arnold Ker said. Three years later, in 2001, Federer hit the big time: in his second appearance in the main draw at Wimbledon he beat Pete ...”

“... 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 ...”