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“... and the ceremonials served as the new liturgy. The only real difficulty with this book, as with Stephen Bayley’s, is that the historical context is not as subtle as it should be. In recent years, urban historians have become increasingly aware of the changes, shifts, about-turns and variations which characterised the evolution of 19th-century local ...”

“... thinking and smiling about being pregnant. And so it should surprise no one that the journalist Stephen Bayley, in the Independent, has compared Moss to Mona Lisa: just as that painting – so claims the novelist Dan Brown, incorrectly – is an ‘androgynous’ self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Moss’s ‘gamine look’ has a similar ‘sexual ...”

“... nouveaux aristos: Lord Rogers, Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Welcome, masters of spectacle: the designer Stephen Bayley and Ken Robinson (who Bayley glosses as ‘in charge of lavatories, parking, visitor flow’). Jobs for those who missed out on Channel 4, Arts Council panjandrums, reality benders. A seat on the board for ...”

“... when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous studies of the period reveal, he has a rather engagingly ...”

“... Smith put it; and the rich succulence of Yerofeev’s Russian, not really translatable although Stephen Mulrine makes a good and brave attempt at it, begins after a few pages to give us the gloriously static feel of Russian social drinking, with the almost welcome sense of a hangover just beginning to feel its way round the back of the skull, but easily ...”

“... write a novel’ instead. The question of ‘Where, exactly, is the Pym world?’ gives John Bayley his title, in the most suggestive of the essays in the Salwak book – a collection which mixes with the true fan’s lack of discrimination a wide range of pieces, from the informatively documentary to the frankly gushing, and shows some bumpy ...”

“... Ettore Schmitz, then aged 46, in Trieste, there was immediately born the relationship of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Schmitz was Jewish by birth, German in education and upbringing, Italian in sympathy and by temperament. He had always longed to be a writer, but his early efforts, published at his own expense, earned him no recognition. His own tycoon father ...”

“... substitute, an alternative in spirituality. Quite the reverse. Whitman and James, just as much as Stephen Crane and Hemingway, helped the liberation of American literature into physicality, inspired by but growing away from the Emersonian traditions of Puritan New England. Poe, whom Whitman met when they were fellow editors of small-time papers, was doing the ...”

“... half-lemur, and wearing a kind of grubby Tyrolean jacket, poses between Tom Driberg and Stephen Spender. There is a kind of innocence about it, the pastoralism which only the past can imitate. Spender, looking like a kindly young schoolmaster, clearly had more to do with the solid success of Horizon than his modest account to Michael Shelden would ...”

“... your love dressed all in white, but come back only from the grave. The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but ...”

“... history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is ...”

“... the point that Trial by Battle is not really a war novel at all. Much the same could be said of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Unlike Piper, Crane at the time had no first-hand experience of what he was writing about: he saw action as a war correspondent only after he had written the book. The point would be, though, that good works of fiction ...”

“... effect is as light as bubbles at the brim, stimulating, tender, thought-provoking. O’Brian’s Stephen Maturin, half-Irish, half-Catalan, an expert surgeon and dedicated zoologist who is also a secret agent, is none the less an extraordinarily convincing character. O’Brian manages to give him a perfectly ordinary personality, complex and vulnerable, yet ...”

“... tributes. This tidy dome of cellophane, plain paper and pink paper funnels, marked the spot where Stephen Lawrence was murdered. The protection of a tall pole, topped with a (fake) surveillance camera, had proved inadequate. The memorial slab had been vandalised. Hence, in these sensitive times, the slow-moving policeman on his tight circuit. What had ...”

“... his own characteristic way a great man. His son acknowledged this in the wry admiration with which Stephen Dedalus, asked by a friend to define him, speaks of his father in A Portrait of the Artist: ‘A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a ...”