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“... books returned to the shelves). Beddoes would have been relieved to know that Judith Higgens and Michael Bradshaw have included none of The Improvisatore in their new and revised selection of his poetry. From The Brides’ Tragedy we get only highlights, but enough to see Beddoes’s developing skill as a poet. The intensity of his imagery and the often ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... story, than an act of moral repair. Pete is haunted by the death of his friend and navigator Nick Bradshaw (‘Goose’) in the original film. He was cleared of any fault, but it’s still the case that Goose died because of decisions Pete made while flying. Goose’s son, Brad (Miles Teller), is part of the team of pilots Pete is responsible for. At one ...”

“... than is offered by the many biographies that approach Catholic hagiography. This was Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy’s purpose in organising a conference in 1985 to mark the 450th anniversary of Fisher’s execution. The proceedings of this are now published as Humanism, Reform and the Reformation. Several essays emphasise Fisher’s career as an ...”

“... A Long Finish, to the wine and truffle country of the Piemonte, the sue tragicomic adventures of Michael Dibdin’s Venetian-born ‘supercop’ Aurelio Zen have offered many of the pleasures of tourism. Dibdin, however, skips over Italy’s ancient monuments to concentrate on its kidnappings and financial scams, its wiretapping and wirepulling, charting the ...”

“... one might fear, their authors’ weaknesses do so too. ‘She felt beautiful that night,’ says Bradshaw. How do these people know? Dreams that money can buy reads like a carefully researched gossip column, with mysterious chasms opening up whenever the records are sparse. No male narrator comes between Mai Zetterling or Florence King and their ...”

“... one response to this dilemma, and is the response which the Oxford edition favours. But then, as Michael Warren argued in a 1977 article on ‘Repunctuation as Interpretation’, modern punctuation ‘has rhetorical implications, and its intrusion inevitably affects the phrasing and, especially for the actor, the intonation of the speech; the most innocent ...”

“... he doesn’t mean it that way), can endow it with fascination, it might be one verse of Bradshaw, one verse of hymn book, one verse of music hall joke. Whereas the other thing – ‘polystrophic rhymed gush to loved ones’ is Benn’s description – not even the layman thinks that’s poetry. Poetry, Anna Akhmatova said, ‘is made from all sorts ...”

“... free improvisation and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was Michael Cardew, the potter; that he wrote a polemical tract alleging that Stockhausen ‘serves imperialism’; and that, after spending a decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have ...”

“... that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, was being taken over by competitive repudiations of Michael O’Halloran, the much put-down Member for North Islington who had come over to the Social Democrats in the company of a considerable contingent of councillors. The timing of the Islington cross-over enabled Liberal speakers to put a name to what gave ...”

“... and the fear Apollinaire warned us of feels both distant and European. It’s a tidy irony that Michael Portillo, a former privatisation-randy Tory ideologue, is now making a living from nostalgic TV shows about the days when British trains weren’t crap, crowded, costly and late. If there isn’t a ‘market’ for something, there’s usually a market ...”

“... as Parker insists, ‘of the writers who came to be associated with the 1930s, Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood was by far the grandest.’ His life-work would be a serial severance of everything that connected him to Marple Hall, his family and his country. When in the 1940s he took out American citizenship, he stripped his name down to ‘Christopher ...”

“... when they went to bed and got up, what they drank, what trains they took (Jenkins was a Bradshaw buff). But about what went on in Gladstone’s head Jenkins leaves us not much the wiser. Here was a marvellous character, a great man, no doubt of that. But what precisely was he on about? Gladstone’s contemporaries were just as puzzled. The knockdown ...”

“... last joke in 1988 when she made an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions ...”

“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”