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“... Who carried a torch for August Strindberg? On his 63rd, and last, birthday, some ten thousand people, led by the Stockholm Workers’ Commune with bands and red union banners, marched past the apartment that he called the Blue Tower, after the name of a Danish prison. The ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘other anthems of liberation’ were sung ...”

“... great non-winners of this prize, a list headed by Henrik Ibsen (d.1906) and Leo Tolstoy (d. 1910). August Strindberg died on 14 May; he at least had had the consolation of a ‘People’s Nobel Prize’, awarded at the climax of a public parade through the streets of Stockholm a couple of years earlier. The fate of Benito Perez Galdos was more ...”

“... more established figures (Smyth’s London debut at the Crystal Palace, for example, featured August Manns conducting her four-movement orchestral Serenade alongside the English premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto and works by Schütz, Wagner and Parry). Delius, however, opted to present himself in 1899 with a three-and-a-half-hour-long ...”

“... August Strindberg’s complete works in Swedish run to 55 volumes, not counting the ten thousand or so letters. He lived for 63 years, yet wrote sixty-odd plays, equalling Shaw, who lived thirty years longer. And not only plays: novels, memoirs, poetry, essays. He was also a superb painter. He led a complicated life with manifold pursuits to which Sue Prideaux’s Strindberg: A Life does condign justice ...”

“... red, wet-look leatherette,/those fancy, flapping lapels’ of flesh. In one of his poems about Strindberg he has the playwright admit ‘I steer towards catastrophe/then write about it.’ Catastrophe transformed to image as though to neutralise its pain is very much Robertson’s thing. That has made him a very good translator of savage deaths and ...”

“... never came to anything. Amateur manager of a small privately-financed theatre where Ibsen and Strindberg had their Hungarian premières, frequent visitor to Florence and Paris, he acquired a somewhat esoteric reputation as the author of literary essays in a high metaphysical mode without showing much interest in politics. Repudiation and denial of his ...”

“... the 2 Indian divisions as soon as they can be got to Marseilles,’ he informs Venetia in August 1914. Yet he also comes across as childishly needy, constantly asking her whether she found some speech he made clever or boring or whether she thinks he acted rightly on some point of national strategy. The Venetia he addresses is partly a daughter (‘It ...”