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“... four hours every day – just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her ...”

“... of war with considerable enthusiasm. In addition to Wolfowitz and Feith, the group included Stephen Cambone, Lawrence Di Rita, William Luti and, on a part-time basis, Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Policy Board. Several of them had had a hand in rebuilding the armed forces, kicking the Vietnam syndrome, and winning the Cold War in the 1980s in ...”

“... Geoffroy’s enthusiasm for transformationism – as evolution was known in those days – was, in Stephen Jay Gould’s accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound ...”

“... of roots, his generation’s is a poetry of rootlessness. One can see this from the first books of Stephen Romer (born like Hofmann in 1957) and Alan Moore (born 1960), and from the two outstanding contributors to New Chatto Poets, Adam Thorpe (born 1956) and Alan Jenkins (born 1955). One might call these four poets ‘sophisticated’, though this perhaps ...”

“... Here at last it is, seven years after Urry’s death, edited from drafts by his former colleague Andrew Butcher. The text runs to less than a hundred pages, but there are ample appendices and source-notes, and anyway these hundred pages of dense documentary detail are worth a thousand of theorising. Our historical knowledge of Elizabethan writers like ...”

“... nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary ...”

“... Brenda Maddox’s use of them in her book on Nora, and the iron curtain which in retaliation Stephen Joyce has dropped around his grandfather’s flame. In Professor A.N. Other’s hands, this would have been a duller and more comprehensively researched book. Probably F.R. Leavis is long enough dead (although the keepers of his gem-like flame remain ...”

“... will suffer only one defect per million. ‘Transferred to the arena of municipal waste,’ said Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, Zero Waste forces attention onto the whole life cycle of products. Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework. It breaks away from the ...”

“... firmly and mistakenly that books about the monarchy always sell. The exceptional success of Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story suggested that sycophantic royal biographies were out, and savage royal exposés were in. Hence the commissioning of a spate of Mortonesque knife-jobs. It was also supposed that what the Sun called the Queen’s bum year ...”

“... they call her Spender,’ Muriel said of the poet in his scampering years, before he became Sir Stephen. ‘She never puts her hand in her pocket.’ Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking. Coffield’s book is a terrific ode to screeching – as well as a generous social history – and it lobs a multicoloured grenade into the ...”

“... blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... Ionce​ witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh ...”

“... which. Sometimes the human shapes have virtually disappeared under the paint or, as in Mr and Mrs Stephen Buckley, are converted into geometric forms; which doesn’t prevent the artist from saying: ‘the subject of the painting is simply a family group sitting round the fire in the evening.’ Other titles seem to promise that the picture will tell a ...”

“... Marriage, mortality, memory, the onset of middle age and the pressure of children criss-cross Andrew Motion’s latest collection. Should we treat the vivid images and incidents that comprise this volume as fragments to be fused into a unity? We might try to construct a single protagonist: a man entering mid-life, married, a father, aware of his own mortality and that of others, slipping at moments through the doors of memory into his childhood, into his adolescence, into an earlier, failed relationship ...”

“... television and I first suggested it to the BBC in 1975, but without success. Then, early in 1978, Stephen Gilbert commissioned it for a series called ‘The Other Side’, also being made from Pebble Mill, Birmingham. The immediate problem was to dramatise the relationship between Great-grandfather and Maxwell, which is merely reported in the story. It was ...”