“... a prurient interest in Jeffrey Archer’s spotty back and T.S. Eliot’s rupture truss (to which Stephen Spender enigmatically refers) mingles with a pious desire to be as well-informed as possible. On the whole, I’m not entirely sorry to be led from temptation by Jones’s obedient vandalism or Valerie Eliot’s stonewall around her husband’s life. At ...”

“... in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s misfortune leads him to wish he had children, to reassess his relationship with his parents, and to ...”

“... man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s ‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it certainly could ...”

“... has risen by 30 per cent since 2000. ‘It is plain that lights have an important role to play,’ Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC, told the Evening Standard in 2011. ‘But with ever more congested streets they need to be very finely tuned to ensure they are not doing more harm than good – and that means they must react to changing traffic ...”

“... expressions such as ‘our urn-like prow’, which would have made Nelson stare: a fine satirical young Scotswoman called Frances Calderon de la Barca whose Life in Mexico (1843) I shall certainly send for; Stephen Crane, so good and true; Gosse; Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others by the score. But it is the verse that ...”

“... the telephone, and the ducal conservatory had become a streamlined modern interior belonging to a young man called the Honourable ‘Daisy’ Vane. ‘Decorations by Bakst,’ the stage directions read. ‘Pictures by Wyndham Lewis, Picasso and Gauguin. Music by Goosens and Stravinsky. Books by Wyndham Lewis, Proust, ...”

“... history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is ...”

“... man confidence in man, and make physicians more dreadful than gout or stone’. And of the Rev. Stephen Hales – the country curate who, in a series of remarkable experiments, first measured blood pressure and flow rates on retired horses – Pope wrote: ‘he is a very good man, only I’m sorry he has his hands so much imbued in ...”

“... not occurred, the dinosaurs might still be here. Under the influence of palaeontologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, the notion of progressive evolution has given way to a more makeshift world view, in which circumstances play as great a part as natural selection in shaping the history of life. In this view, chance happenings and sudden disasters may have ...”

“... is usually acceptable only if it goes hand in hand with breeding (whence the popularity of Stephen Fry). Walcott does not fit the bill: he’s an outsider and an overreacher and his work betrays a definite lack of cool; it sparkles and it shines. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a 1936 recording of Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb and his ...”

“... family life.A short story, ‘Portrait of an Artist’, recalls the relationship between the young Chaudhuri and his Bengali mastermoshai (private tutor), who encouraged him to write and engaged him in long discussions on philosophy and literature:He compared himself explicitly to Leopold Bloom and me to ...”

“... SDS officer, Peter Francis, spoke publicly about the unit’s role in spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by a gang of white youths in 1993, a fact that had not been disclosed to the Macpherson Inquiry into the police failure to properly investigate Lawrence’s murder. Francis claimed that he had been asked to find ...”

“... Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love affairs, prison, exile, expatriation, hunger and poverty, hospital, topped off by a ...”

“... in the making, and already on the make. Hanif Kureishi found the perfect foil in the director Stephen Frears, who’s proved again and again, in films as different as Prick up your ears and Dangerous Liaisons, his talent for black comedy, and his eye for the perverse and grotesque, for characters who are both farcical and pathetic. Five years on, My ...”

“... father agrees. After all, you are a respected figure. Your experiment goes something like this. A young girl, Sarah Nelmes, is a patient of yours and is known to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). You draw a syringe full of blood from her arm and go back to James Phipps to make two superficial cuts in his skin, which are about ...”