“... describing the fall from favour of G.F. Watts. He was a family connection – his portraits of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen found their way to Gordon Square, along with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, when the orphaned Stephens set up house there in 1904. But he was not a hero. At the 1903 retrospective of his work Vanessa and Virginia decided that ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”

“... the aristocratic Calthorpe Estate, which was still tending it carefully as late as the 1960s, when John Madin was commissioned to design by far the best modernist housing in the city for the area. Other social improvement plans have grown out of it: Edgbaston adjoins Aston Webb’s overripe Victorian university buildings, and is close to the rangier, folksier ...”

“... the arrival of a novel that was ‘trying to pioneer in the direction we’ve been discussing’. Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) wrote that Invisible Man was ‘superior to any of the passionate, incoherent books of Richard Wright … because Ellison has bypassed all formulas of protest and self-pity and cast off the ...”

“... indignation. ‘Let’s be clear, we have some difficult years ahead,’ said the TUC president, Leslie Manasseh, a schoolmasterly former civil servant, in his opening address. The Sunday afternoon seafront in Brighton was sternly autumnal, and the presence of a few wind-battered pamphleteers was one of the few signs that the city was hosting the TUC’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cooking. All the good in the world has always been done after a good dinner.’ If the historian John Tosh’s picture of Victorian masculinities is correct, Household Management was first published during a rather brief cultural moment when men were exceptionally satisfied with their absorption into a domesticity controlled by their wives. It seems clear ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”