“... a fluster, because the police have just phoned to say a gang of book thieves is on the way and the Stephen Kings are unprotected) says that ‘one can stand in certain parts of Dewsbury and see upwards of sixty mill chimneys at a time.’ My mother’s second husband was a Yorkshireman who had started work at 16, sweeping the floors at a small mill ...”

“... education which encouraged his precocious archaeological and linguistic interests. Even as a young schoolboy he was showing a taste for Apocryphal texts: first out of a perverse delight in their obscurity and eccentricity, but soon with a genuine fascination which was to endure, and to make him the leading British scholar in a subject that was a very ...”

“... description for A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen’s loosely autobiographical account of a not-so-young Russian-American graduate student’s ambivalent year in Putin’s Russia. The novel’s hero – also named Andrei – is similarly torn. From his home in New York he promises his older brother – who has suddenly fled to London after getting on the wrong ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”

“... to wring some drama out of Parfit’s delayed transition from his seven-year prize fellowship as a young man at All Souls to a lifelong senior research fellowship, to the point of suggesting in the title of his chapter about it that it amounted to a scandal. But even aficionados of C.P. Snow novels will find the gruel rather thin, since it boils down to the ...”

“... At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling,     Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all ...”

“... Nusrat Raza, a young Pakistani woman, was seen by a passer-by as a ‘great ball of fire coming down the stairs’ of her house. Raza, an asylum seeker who lived in Bradford, had recently been told that the Home Office had refused her claim to stay in the country. At least 221 asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers have died violent deaths in the UK in the past 17 years ...”

“... Foster Morris, an ageing English writer who failed to live up to his early promise, in whom the young Naipaul sees ‘the intellectual uncertainty of the unfulfilled writer’, an ‘emotional incompleteness’; a young Venezuelan man whose wife humiliates him by leaving him for a Syrian shopkeeper; the crippled criminals ...”

“... was rung up some years ago by a researcher working on Hugh Dalton’s diaries to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow ...”

“... entirely appropriate. Thus rechristened, O’Faolain did all the things an ambitious half-poor young man should do. He joined the IRA. He took to speaking Gaelic with a will. He spent his holidays in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) of West Cork. He entered the dreamworld of racial and national purity, which, for an urban, Anglicised policeman’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... develop, and to earn some of the wealth that industrialised nations now possess. Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks’s book, the first attempt in recent years to examine African views of China, makes clear that there is hunger in Africa for a new partner. Though they are cautious about the negative impact of China’s rise, and wary of the way China treats its ...”

“... people like me directing films, I would do anything. Working with Karel was special. Just so nice. Stephen Frears (film director): In 1965, I was working at the Royal Court in London, which was a bit like being on call to the Borgias, a place full of brilliant and terrifying men. Then Karel came to direct a play by the Italian playwright Franco Brusati. His ...”