“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be prime-time viewing. A Frenchwoman, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, helps an ingenious young Dutch Socialist to outwit the Scrooge-like Establishment. Hundreds of millions of pounds are at stake. The rank-and-file defy the mighty. Law confronts power. Three Governments risk being taken to court. All this is part of the story unfolded by Davids ...”

“... resisted biographical readings in his 2002 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, and, reviewing Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) in the LRB, he deplored ‘the heuristic poverty of biographical explanations of works of art’.* Others, however, including Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one,’ he says rather oddly) ‘lost his faith as a direct result of seeing’ that great young man’s performance. After four years of undergraduate life at Oxford, he had to think of a career. After a year at Harvard, he put himself into the hands of one of those London institutions ‘long dedicated to coaching Civil Service candidates’, where ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but is now published in full for the first time, edited, introduced and ably annotated by Stephen Coan of the Natal Witness. It has the fascination that goes with anything written in 1914, even though the more spectacular events of Armageddon were slated for the adjacent continent. No one should be surprised to come across words now ruled ...”

“... House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions ...”