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“... 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 ...”

“... art and literature. He might also be called ridiculous. Nobody was more warmly encouraging to any young writer or painter who promised to transcend the bounds of everyday life. In the Forties he was excited by the rattling rhetoric of the Apocalyptic poets, believing that the day of Audens and MacNeices was over, that poetry ‘must now be positive and ...”

“... rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent paper in Palaeobiology by Stephen Jay Gould. What is the new theory? Is it indeed likely to replace the currently orthodox ‘neo-Darwinian’ view? Proponents of the new view make a minimum and a maximum claim. The minimum claim is an empirical one concerning the nature of the fossil ...”

“... in Anthony Blond’s Book Book. According to Wilson (don, novelist, Sunday Telegraph reviewer, Young Fogey and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in Britain: The days have vanished when reviewing was a ‘serious’ matter. The articles in the Sunday papers are far too short to be able to do justice ...”

“... plays, The Balt and The Immortal Husband. The relationship of poetry to theatre is spelled out in Stephen Yenser’s indispensable study, The Consuming Myth, to which I owe many of my thoughts about Merrill. As Merrill said in an interview, ‘In “An Urban Convalescence” I first hit upon this sense of the sell-reflexive side of the poem – that you can ...”

“... didn’t last, but Jean did secure two long interviews with the man himself, and she told the young editors George Plimpton and Robert Silvers that she would give the interview to the Paris Review, so long as they made her an associate editor. They took the material (Number 12 in their famous series ‘The Art of Fiction’) and Stein got her place on the ...”

“... begins in Paris, ‘the biggest city west of Cairo’ and ‘five times the size of London’. Stephen Nichols starts his chapter by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly ...”

“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Given the inflammatory nature of the topic, and the powerful sociopolitical questions it raises, it would pay a writer to tread gingerly here. Will ...”

“... firms dominated Iraq’s economic life. Riverboat freight on the Euphrates was monopolised by Stephen Lynch & Co. When the Chalabis set off for their frequent trips to Lebanon and elsewhere they travelled on the coaches of the Nairn Transport Company. Andrew Weir & Co, for whom Hadi Chalabi was the principal grain buyer, dominated the country’s barley ...”

“... film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved ...”

“... air-raid warden, was disgusted by the ‘faint susurrus’ of intellectuals dashing for desk jobs. Stephen Spender, he sneered, had ‘feathered his young nest in the Ministry of Information’. Just months later Greene, who embodied in his own tortured personality as many contradictions, deceptions and hypocrisies as the ...”

“... usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly forgotten, and there was every reason to suppose that Holmes would soon disappear too. He’s a derivative of the detective heroes of Edgar ...”

“... priesthood. The artist as secular priest crops up as late as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as Stephen Dedalus exchanges consecrating the eucharist for that transformation of the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and James, Proust and Joyce are adepts ...”

“... On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children, two girls and a boy. There are four lively, happy people in the photograph, but only six arms and six legs, for the two girls share a body ...”