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“... Stravinsky was a dull correspondent, but at least he was Stravinsky. His wife’s letters to him, which preponderate over his to her in Robert Craft’s new selection of Stravinskyiana, Dearest Bubushkin, have biographical importance but do not all that frequently rise above the level of any wife to any husband ...”

“... My fairly extensive – and, analytically, intensive – writings about Stravinsky confine themselves to his music and the psychology of his creativity – to the products and the nature of his towering genius. About the human being I have never yet written a word: the greater the genius the less there is of a causal connection or correlation between his life and his art – whence Beethoven came to be the communicator of profound, unmixed joy: On the present occasion, however, it is my duty to tell the potential reader of close on five hundred pages whether Stravinsky the man is worth knowing about ...”

“... and funny reminiscences by Auden’s friends, notably in the Conversations of Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, hardly sentimental, inexperienced or patient observers of the human scene. The comments on Auden display only in an extreme form the mentality at work here, with its incapacity for understanding, accuracy or minimum attentiveness. Allowing ...”

“... to borrow his typically ornate term – from Robert Craft’s diary of his years with Stravinsky first appeared in the famous series of their conversation books issued throughout the Sixties. In 1972, after the composer’s death, a far bigger selection was published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a ...”

“... At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of 20th-century musical thought and imagery’. There couldn’t be a richer subject for a musical biographer and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject ...”

“... rare objects. The fourth volume, the one with the letters, was inherited by Romola’s son-in-law, Igor Markevitch, the conductor, who bequeathed it to the Bibliothèque Nationale. But at Romola’s death, the rights to the whole text had become the property of Nijinsky’s two daughters, Kyra and Tamara, who never gave permission for translation and ...”

“... Moscow had become a centre of artistic experimentation, the place where Scriabin (to whose museum Stravinsky made a pilgrimage in 1962), Kandinsky, Malevich, Pasternak and Mayakovsky lived. After the Revolution, ‘it became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a city of modernity and of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted to ...”

“... if one looks at the first wave as a whole, how is one to compare the loss to Russia of, say, Stravinsky with that of the electronics engineer Vladimir Zvorykin or the aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky? As the book proceeds, figures who left Russia by other routes before and sometimes after the 1922 expulsions are ...”

“... hours of music, which include Shostakovich (playing as well as being performed), Prokofiev and Stravinsky, with performers like Gilels, Richter and Rostropovich. Del claimed the archive was worth as much as $9 billion – a huge exaggeration. But its value is great and the deal is being protested by Nikolai Petrov and the Ministry of Culture, among ...”