“... Graham Greene, who fed her on oysters and smoked salmon, and took her to see Charlie’s Aunt and King Lear. When the film star Maureen Swanson wanted 18th-century Chinese wallpaper in her dining-room, but found she couldn’t afford it, Jocelyn Rickards was commissioned to create an oriental effect with her brushes. After two days of painting lotus lilies ...”

“... as an appendix a lively bibliographical essay on his predecessors. This begins, surprisingly, with Stephen Potter, once well known as the author of a series of cod-advice books, including One-Upmanship. Potter was briefly an assistant lecturer in English at Birkbeck College in London, and in 1937 published The Muse in Chains, a semi-subversive account of the ...”

“... to the benefit of all expeditions to this day.) More important, in 1988, a British climber, Stephen Venables, lived to tell of the night he spent out on his own after climbing an uncharted route by the East Face, without oxygen. The second doubt took no account of ‘summit fever’, or the effects of altitude on people’s judgment. Even before the ...”

“... of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart of power, but it isn’t exactly a biography, or a work of political history; it might be better described as a voyage through a landscape of political crisis, seen through the eyes of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”

“... between master and servant provided a template for almost every kind of affiliation: between king and courtier, ruler and subject, patron and client, commander and soldier, employer and apprentice, or even between husband and wife, parent and child, mistress and lover. ‘Trust and service’, a character in Middleton’s The Witch (c.1616) declares, are ...”

“... Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of different types of sail and other nautical details. But the plotting – at least in a narrow, screenwriterly sense – is ...”

“... instrument of the same kind: it was adopted during a brief period when Britain had neither a king nor a Parliament (James II having first dissolved Parliament and then fled), by an ad hoc convention which offered William of Orange the Crown, accompanied by a Declaration of Rights which the convention, endorsed the next year by a lawfully summoned ...”

“... from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in their minds at the time. Few episodes in the history ...”

“... deep commonalty (or maybe a depressed commonalty) surviving below the Hanoverian consensus (Blake, Stephen Duck, the poet-labourer, who drowned himself in a fit of despondency). In a way, Lucas is most interesting about the poets in between these groups, the traitors or defeatists like Wordsworth or Tennyson. Both men, after all, had strong dialect interests ...”

“... The lady went into a trance and found herself reliving her earlier life as a servant to the King of France ... The spoon bent without the boy so much as touching it ...’ etc. Next comes the liberal-minded physicist who on the face of it appears quite willing to believe it all, provided only that his measuring instruments can confirm that the events ...”

“... them, and when it is done with balance and integrity, as it is by John Barrell, Marcia Pointon or Stephen Daniels, writing on Coalbrookdale by Night, then the reader, whether they agree or not, gains by the reading. The history of art cannot be the history of art alone, but it must take the art into account. If the argument wanders too far from the picture ...”

“... Teresa than the Julie Andrews kind of nun, who might just want to rip off the wimple and sing. Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s collection of 100 sonnets through the ages is heavily weighted towards poems from the 20th and 21st centuries, and also towards some occasionally groan-worthy American poems – though perhaps hearts less jaded than mine leap up ...”

“... Stephen Kotkin​ ’s Stalin is all paradox. He is pockmarked and physically unimpressive, yet charismatic; a gambler, but cautious; undeterred by the prospect of mass bloodshed, but with no interest in personal participation. Cynical about everyone else’s motives, he himself ‘lived and breathed ideals’. Suspicious of ‘fancy-pants intellectuals’, he was an omnivorous reader whose success in getting the Russian creative intelligentsia into line was ‘uncanny ...”