“... in the stage play in the 1920s; Michelle Pfeiffer, also fifty, was, as ever, Michelle Pfeiffer in Stephen Frears’s film version of 2009). The curtains are pink, as are the paper shades on the electric sconces and the ‘ravishing’ flesh of the nymphet in the painting on the wall. And Léa’s dressing-gown, and her underwear, and the strawberries she eats ...”

“... would damage his fledgling relations with Mugabe’s government. Rowland was embarrassed when Stephen Glover wrote a long, detailed and mainly accurate account in the Daily Telegraph of his links with Dr Jonas Savimbi, leader of the UNITA rebel movement in Angola. Journalists who interview Rowland are usually given long lectures about the justice of ...”

“... of his ability to steer the bargain through Congress. The legislative triumph went instead to Stephen Douglas, a politician from Illinois who, though four years younger than Lincoln, had already gained the national prominence he craved. In 1854, as the government debated the admission of Nebraska, Douglas persuaded Congress to abandon the Missouri line in ...”

“... ticks were taken away, they wouldn’t pay to get them back. ‘Fuck that, they should pay me,’ Stephen King tweeted. LeBron James told his 52 million followers that he wouldn’t be paying either. And if the lords didn’t have blue ticks, then the peasants didn’t want them either. Almost the only people who seemed willing to pay for them were either ...”

“... the right religious dimension? We still lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of ...”

“... made little effort to stop the business ... the timing of the Chechen gangs’ transformation from small bands involved in petty extortion and stolen-car rackets into sophisticated crime conglomerates trading in guns and drugs coincided with the rise of Chechnya as a financial and political force.’ Sterling, also writing before the war, says that the ...”

“... calming’. Others are baffling: Spotify distinguishes between ‘small room’, ‘big room’, ‘deep big room’ and ‘escape room’. It’s fun to imagine what these might sound like, but there’s no need: click on any of the names and an example of the genre plays.Browsing Every Noise at Once is a reminder of how ...”

“... morn breaks on their quivering bed,Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun,And ocean isles so small, the dog-fish trackingA dead whale, who should find them, would swim thriceAround them, and fare onward – all to holdThe offspring of my brain. Nor these alone:Bronze labyrinth, palace, pyramid and crypt,Baths, galleries, courts, temples and ...”

“... deep sea keep you up. The second edition of Science and Poetry had not been out a year before Stephen Spender entitled his book on modern writers and belief (or unbelief) The Destructive Element, describing Richards’s note as ‘a focal point from which diverge rays towards past and future’. Certainly Conrad’s words give some insight into ...”

“... up to a topic while naming it only by a metonym is telling – perhaps intended, too, as a small frowning courtesy to the three lady members of the fifteen-strong committee.Court cases are inevitably a key part of the record: often pitiful in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray ...”

“... huge for a far-right rally in the UK. But the once fringe ideas of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, have become mainstream for Reform and the Conservatives, and for populist right-wing movements around the world. The starriest guest at the rally was Robinson’s admirer Elon Musk, who took part by video link. Simion’s presence was ...”

“... So, impressing this teacher became most important to me.He was trying to make you feel small but he ended up making you feel big.Absolutely. When I got fewer red marks than these other guys, the footballers, I began to think I was getting somewhere. This teacher – call him ‘P.J.’ – rarely praised anybody. Or if he did, he praised them at ...”

“... by the week, his marriage in tatters. He finished a highly psychologised critical biography of Stephen Crane. He replaced Roethke for a term at the University of Washington in Seattle; lectured briefly at the University of Vermont; met Jarrell, without any fur flying. In 1952 he spent the spring term at the University of Cincinnati, a generally successful ...”

“... thought a good idea to get someone from the Trump campaign, given that in July 2016 there was a small but not insignificant chance he might end up as president. The person who turned up was Carter Page. None of the people I spoke to seemed entirely sure who he was or what he was doing there. He sat through two days of discussions about lobbying and ...”

“... seven years earlier. They were an unsavoury bunch, who all had experience of committing fraud in small teams; Frizer, as if going down to posterity as the killer of a great Elizabethan playwright weren’t ignominy enough, had also been a property-speculator in Basingstoke. Of Marlowe’s recent biographers, only Constance Kuriyama is prepared to accept the ...”