“... early morning growl, which by midday had developed into a thundering chorus of virtuous wrath. Stephen Fry had reported that during a recent depressive episode he’d tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drink and drugs. It was universally agreed that a famous person revealing their own clinical despair could only be helpful to the anonymous millions ...”

“... performance than Lohan, whose tardiness and wayward lurches were chronicled in an on-set report by Stephen Rodrick for the New York Times magazine titled ‘Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.’ The article was such a crunchy read, so stuffed with only-in-Hollywood anecdotes and luxury shopping specifics, that it upstaged the movie ...”

“... power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the rise of illiberalism in Eastern Europe was a consequence of the West’s imposition of its liberal-democratic system on countries to which it was ill-suited. They describe the response of Eastern Europeans to Western political and ...”

“... Cohn-Bendit to Dachau!’ while the cars hooted the old Algérie française rhythm. Caute quotes Stephen Spender’s description of this scene: ‘the triumphant bacchanal of the Social World of Conspicuous Consumption, shameless, crowing and more vulgar than any crowd I had seen on Broadway or in Chicago’. If Tariq Ali represents ‘the optimism of the ...”

“... an awkward triangle (first time as romance comedy, second time as painful farce) with his friends Stephen and Natasha Spender, he proposed marriage almost simultaneously to three different women. Women fought over his remains, his private secretary unsuccessfully contesting the will he had changed so often. The title of his final novel, Playback, could be ...”

“... he has to give. For Rossetti holds us in the same way we are held by the restless and brilliant Stephen Dedalus, who was – as he told Mr Deasy – a ‘learner’ rather than a teacher. To read or look at his work is to enter a demanding intellectual force-field. Unlike his greatly gifted but undemonstrative sister, Dante Gabriel’s work is driven by ...”

“... told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.’ Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed the film-maker’s ‘bumptious expression’, as well as his ‘pin-head face’ and ‘flapping ears’. Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about ...”

“... depth, borrowing extensively from le Carré’s odd, unhappy childhood and his experiences as a young intelligence officer in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the effort often seems misplaced, in part because his attempts to create character-driven narratives continue to lean on genre conventions. Unfaithful wives, shrewd yet eccentric crones and idealistic ...”

“... but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. Stephen Byers and Robinson are currently trying to prevent the sale of Bower’s book, but one would like to hear how others mentioned here respond. Of course, Labour sleaze is nothing new, though it did not, in Attlee’s day, get anywhere near the top. Ever ...”

“... AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus … in the national pro-Israel effort’. The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The ...”

“... contest within the BBC had been between the guardians of the Reithian heritage and provocative young producers in drama and satire who sought to turn the BBC into a site of political and cultural opposition. During most of that time, there was a fragile armistice – even sometimes an alliance – between satirists, drama producers and documentary makers ...”

“... and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air’, a poem which ends with the Dalai Lama being exterminated from the air, saying it was ‘certainly poor and annoying … I thought the Dalai Lama almost the only touch of imagination.’ When he wrote to Tate on the same subject he ...”

“... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...”