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“... at Matthew Arnold’s, asks his friend to ‘bring it next time you come to the club’. Leslie Stephen, elected in 1877 on the strength of his History of English Thought in the 18th Century, enjoys the irony that this defence of free thought has given him ‘admission to a respectable haunt of bishops and judges’. By 1850, the Disruption in the Kirk has ...”

“... quality, have treated the sculptures as if they were landscapes or people in the street. Two young Englishmen, Stephen Haweis and Henry Coles, who photographed many of them in the early 1900s, preferred to take their pictures at sunset. Some of the images they made, in which detail is buried in deep shadow, are as soft ...”

“... Stephen Sondheim is America’s master of musical theatre, as long as we are prepared for the work to be brilliant but not relaxed. His is a voice of solitude struggling to believe in company, and that of a lifelong game-player, so be careful about taking this book at face value as an autobiography, or as giving the whole story ...”

“... Philip Neri, his parish church. The adjacent bedroom had been turned into a drop-in dormitory for young boys and as the night drew on it filled up. At regular intervals the office door would be pushed ajar and a bashful face would appear. A few words would be exchanged in Zulu or Sotho – Lafont spoke both – and a frail figure in torn shorts and a grubby ...”

“... and lived to see night fall.’ (That’s from Waugh’s Men at Arms.) Then the first image: Stephen Newman in his shorts, aged nine, on the ‘most exciting day’ of his life – a day spent in the fur storage depot in which his father looks after Marilyn Monroe’s mink. The sun follows him to a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford: ‘It was the summer the ...”

“... Guzmán, whose father was one of Chile’s best-known poets, asks him to send the text. The young waiter who shows us to a lunch table with Victor Jara’s widow tells us that he, too, is Victor Jara, named by his parents after the singer and guitarist, imprisoned with thousands of others on 11 September 1973 in the stadium where four years earlier he ...”

“... trading-floor is fully up and running, but the process begins back in Ulysses. ‘The problem,’ Stephen tells Buck Mulligan after Buck scolds him for trying to trade Shakespearean theory for a bit of English coin, ‘is to get money.’ Should they solicit it, he sarcastically asks, from the milkwoman who’s just passed by? She takes money from them and ...”

“... straight ahead, unwilling or unable to unburden themselves to a Western reporter. However, one young man did overcome his fear. ‘I want to give you a message,’ he said. ‘You must tell President Bush to help us ... Saddam Hussein is killing our people. We need your help or we will all die.’ Hundreds of thousands of people had left Basra, he told ...”

“... The study of English political history has suffered a grievous loss with the death of Stephen Koss in New York on 25 October last. Though only 44, hardly more than half my age, Stephen had already established himself as an authority of the first rank on British political history in the 19th and 20th centuries ...”

“... composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of ...”

“... and the way they relate to each other – in a word, the story. Once again, Stendhal’s hero is a young man who wants to succeed in the world and remain decent at the same time. The twin discoveries of self and society are to the novel what counterpoint is to music, and Stendhal is their unequalled master. Lucien is Stendhal’s luckiest hero. Unlike Julien ...”

“... from Incline our hearts are beginning to flag. In particular, one begins to feel – as the young Julian used to do when forced to listen to his uncle’s anecdotes – that it’s possible to have a surfeit of Lampitts. Nor do the regulars at the Black Bottle – wittily reproduced though their idioms are – prove to have much mileage in them, though ...”

“... in the darkened cinema and as each character pulled out his weapon and began firing furiously, the young Arab men around us would groan and moan in a kind of ecstasy, crying out the names of the weapons. All around us in the cinema we could hear the words ‘Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov; Biretta, Biretta.’ These young men knew ...”

“... For those too young – or too old – to remember, Mandy Rice-Davies had a walk-on part in the Great Profumo Scandal of 1963. Now she has published a racily ghosted autobiography. It says nothing of much interest about anything or anybody that matters, and paints the predictable sympathetic picture of a fun-loving girl more sinned against than sinning ...”

“... a period of ten years, why weren’t they investigated sooner? A former student at the school, Stephen, who was cast in a Scarlett ballet in 2017, told me he and other male students had been warned by a principal dancer of the company: ‘Watch out for Liam.’ He claims that ‘everyone knew’ that Scarlett behaved inappropriately with students at the ...”