“... character’. James’s view was not untypical of the masculine response of the time. Leslie Stephen, a friend and near-contemporary of Mrs Gaskell, regarded her achievements in much the same light as he would have done those of his own daughter; and Jenny Uglow is surely right to stress the implicit comeback in the Gaskell novels, which show them both ...”

“... Her half-brothers were not welcome callers, although the tale of their sexual abuse of the Stephen sisters as children is probably a good deal exaggerated. Interesting that in the days of parlourmaids it was not necessary to take the receiver off the hook, but merely to appear resolutely to be the parlourmaid, in the face of unwelcome ...”

“... like her own mother, who could be said to have died of it. But domestically speaking, Leslie Stephen was a snivelling and self-pitying bore and tyrant; and Ann Thwaite shows without trying, though with admirable clarity, that Tennyson was nothing of the kind. On the contrary, his wife’s goodness, it could be said, was only made possible by his ...”

“... out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than it is easy ...”

“... had folded and been replaced after a while by Encounter, funded by the CIA, unknown to its editor Stephen Spender or to Cyril, whose intermittently oppressive patronage Spender seems to have borne with remarkable kindness and forbearance. He was to publish Connolly’s last and unfinished attempt in his own inimitable style of demi-fiction, Shade Those ...”

“... for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly, delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. In the course of it he quoted ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and he quoted it as ‘where art thou roaming?’ He had omitted to verify his memory of something so well-known. He silently put ...”

“... fell-walker on a scale more heroic even than Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sailor brother John. As Stephen Gill acutely points out in his recent Wordsworth biography, an excellent companion piece to Holmes on Coleridge, ‘Coleridge actually needed action, not the tranquillity of a domestic cot but excitement, whether it be from the demands of London or the ...”

“... contains a number of tender moments, though none so moving as the scene in The Hireling, in which Stephen Leadbitter, an ex-army sergeant, strides manfully up and down the nave of Winchester Cathedral, since its exact measurements interest his customer Lady Franklin, with whom he is falling in love. Proust writes of the springtime of social flowers that ...”

“... a spy is arrested’ was set up in type but never printed: the Westminster’s editor, Stephen Spender’s uncle, was mildly pro-German in 1912, and he also turned down a piece called ‘In Fortified Germany’. But the third and fourth articles made it – Lawrence’s debut as a travel writer – and they already exhibit their author’s hedgehog ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris ...”

“... quaint survivor from the world of tentative liberal open-mindedness, rather like the ghost of John Bayley infiltrating a branch of Militant Tendency. Before considering the terminal ironies of this rejection of printed texts, it is essential to examine the history of English as an academic subject. As Brian Doyle shows in the only valuable essay in this ...”

“... flame’ they show is self-deprecating, careful to show that it can make nothing happen. Stephen Spender’s ‘political’ poetry of that pre-war time is simpler and more moving, more Russian in instinct, but from the poet’s – or any imaginative writer’s – point of view the problem in the West of taking an attitude to tyranny and terror is ...”

“... of the most interesting comments that Pasternak ever made on his art, in a letter in English to Stephen Spender: ‘Nineteenth-century art, either in painting or poetry but above all in the great novels of the period, is fixed in narratives which are irrevocable, like verdicts or sentences, beyond recall.’ The fixedness is that of the individual, the ...”

“... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from Spender, himself ...”