“... was as shifting as any of his characters’, until the great breakthrough late in 1873, when Leslie Stephen offered him £400 to serialise Far from the Madding Crowd in the Cornhill. It was a lot of money: Tomalin, with the biographer’s welcome nose for cash, informs us that a year earlier, Hardy’s cousin Tryphena had become headmistress of a primary ...”

“... like Victor and past military bureaucrats like the Cold War deterrence expert Michael Quinlan and Leslie Groves, who ran the project to build the first atom bomb.On the face of it, Cummings ought to have as much contempt for Boris Johnson’s Faragist Conservative Party as he does for Nigel Farage himself. And yet he appears to be doing his utmost to steer it ...”

“... insisting – all he wanted was ‘specimens, male and female of each of the big game animals’. Leslie Tarlton himself would be Roosevelt’s ‘white hunter’. The terms of their agreement clarified the relationship between hunter and client. ‘The trophy was the client’s, and the client shot first. The white hunter protected the client in dangerous ...”

“... Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad adieu to Philip ...”

“... of Madras – was in some ways a flight from bad times at home. Their Glaswegian father John’s business putting up electric party illuminations in the gardens of the West London gentry never recovered from the blackouts after the zeppelin raids, and the financial help the family got from his wife’s father, a one-time miner turned wealthy ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... a field which, he maintains, has traditionally been neglected in England. Between the time of Leslie Stephen and, say, Quentin Skinner, that was certainly true. Even today, this branch of studies has far less elbow-room in English than in American universities. Since the Seventies, however, the situation has been changing, and the rise of a new kind of ...”

“... two volumes were written to members of the Norton family.) With the Nortons in London, James saw Leslie Stephen, whom James’s father had also known, and met Charles Dickens’s daughter, who was, he reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a ...”

“... any more unexpected than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s ...”

“... though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the ...”

“... effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his ...”