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“... I only need to hear a few bars from Mozart’s G minor Symphony (K. 550) and in a flash Hans is as vivid a presence as he was when he was alive. Not any old bars, mind you: to be precise, bars 125 to 136 of the finale, where in a remarkable unison passage which propels us into the development Mozart exploits (almost) the total resources of the chromatic scale ...”

“... Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his mind: it is a book fundamentally misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors ...”

“... I have examined – those of Conversations and Expositions and Developments in the possession of Donald Mitchell, who edited them for Faber – do not indicate whatever Stravinsky’s contribution might have been; and that ‘very largely’ is just what one would like Craft to explain. The essay infuriatingly leaves open the question of Craft’s ...”

“... December 1907. The tome, a thousand pages long, moves at the geological speed of one page a day. Donald Mitchell, the author of three books about Mahler, has edited a new one, The Mahler Companion. Two other biographies, by Peter Franklin and Jonathan Carr, have recently appeared. And, of course, there are recordings – well over a thousand versions of ...”

“... collection of Britten’s letters and diaries, entitled Letters from a Life and edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, appeared in 1991, and its first volume covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he ...”

“... for the term ‘selected’ is perhaps doubtful. There may be omissions otherwise motivated. Mitchell’s long and informative Introduction says something about Britten’s earlier love affairs, and is candid enough about the rather awful, yet productive relationship with the mother, and the productive one with the permanent lover. Peter Pears had ...”

“... how they huffed and puffed and told him to go back home!) resounded with his intellectual kind. Donald Mitchell recalled the startling impact of one of Keller’s early reviews: ‘I was knocked out by it, by its precision, its confidence … Gone were all those boring generalities and tedious descriptions … and in their place, detailed observations ...”

“... have a duty to recognise this. They must not attempt to divert or thwart it, to persist, as Donald Mitchell puts it, ‘in the use ... of a language which has lost the power of meaningful speech’. This ‘exhausted language’ argument is aptly put against Strauss because he himself used it against Brahms. Its force is not so much intellectual as ...”

“... and textual annotations (there are rather few of these, but at least he doesn’t try to emulate Donald Mitchell-Philip Reed’s ploy when editing Britten’s letters of slipping a full-blown biography into the footnotes) while always putting the case for the defence (if sometimes disapproving of Walton’s egotism). Stephen Lloyd’s solid monograph is ...”

“... rational’, emotionless, though this was never true of Schoenberg’s work. In 1963, the critic Donald Mitchell wrote that though Schoenberg’s serialist works ‘were hardly to be heard, the Method was … hotly disputed.’ The wrinkles ironed out, and the mysticism swept under the carpet, Schoenberg became known as the inventor of a system, the ...”

“... to press, the VIX was 9.8. It has been low for many months, and shows no clear sign of increasing. Donald Trump would no doubt attribute the low readings to investors’ confidence in his leadership. But I have my doubts. There is an alternative explanation. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is often taken to mean that whenever you measure something, you ...”

“... burden to lay even on such a big animal, and requires some massive scholarly leverage; W.J.T. Mitchell invokes the secular trinity of Darwin, Marx and Freud. He traces the historical origin and development of our ideas about dinosaurs, through evolutionary theory and palaeontology (primarily Darwin and Cuvier), 19th and 20th-century history of ...”

“... With her​ high cheekbones and her flaxen hair, Joni Mitchell emerged in the late 1960s as some kind of hippy Venus with an overbite. She was the personification of the New Woman, liberated by the pill and by her talent to take ownership of her body, her art and her destiny. She was thoughtful, feisty, free-wheeling, ‘open to experience and in touch with the miraculous’, as she put it ...”

“... with the demise of the Labour Government, the Communist culprits were hunted down. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Russia in 1951; Kim Philby was finally exposed in 1963; Anthony Blunt in 1979. The first three took refuge in Russia. Blunt died in disgrace, deserted both by the Leftist friends of his youth and by the Royal Family and his colleagues in ...”

“... wars, of which this is the third volume.* Woodward is not only granted audiences: he interviews Donald Rumsfeld, and others, at his home, in his own kitchen, over supper. If you’re Nigella-ish, you’ll be disappointed by his non-disclosure of what there was to eat.This hasn’t always been so. Woodward’s first Watergate article wasn’t about the ...”