“... humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen Spender as ‘a literary mover and shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his ...”

“... any of the band’s other songs. For a long time it was an obscure B-side – so obscure that when Stephen Malkmus, Pavement’s frontman, heard it playing in a bakery a few years ago, he didn’t even recognise it as one of his own. According to a fascinating article by the journalist Nate Rogers, ‘Harness Your Hopes’ started to become popular in ...”

“... wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the time our table is ‘background action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between ...”

“... 2002 it had plummeted to $8000. The population had quadrupled since 1970: a quarter of a million young men enter the inhospitable labour market each year. Actual conditions cannot be determined with any precision; officially, unemployment is around 10 per cent, but it may be as much as three or four times that among the ...”

“... of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of ...”

“... a conference on the literature of the Second World War. Asked for suitable names, I recommend Stephen Spender (because of his experience de-Nazifying German libraries after the war) and Alan Ross. When I mention that Ross served in the Navy and, in poems like ‘Murmansk’, recalls the war in the Baltic, Stabnikov seems satisfied. We pass the now famous ...”

“... domain of the writer, the domain of ‘unconscious reality’ as she put it in a letter to Stephen Clingman, to which the writer, unlike the intellectual, has unique, almost mystical access. ‘Even if he writes about a great public event, or war or revolution,’ she said in her acceptance speech for the 1961 W.H. Smith Prize for Friday’s ...”

“... the bus-traveller’s equivalent of the zigzag walk (first left, first right ad infinitum) that Stephen Graham had earlier recommended, in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), as a way of manoeuvring the modern city into new patterns of disclosure. Starting at Victoria Coach Station, Goldring boards a bus that is about to depart for Essex, a county he has ...”

“... 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last recorded utterances, all of them heretical, included the opinions that ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies to his bosom . . . he vsed him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and that ‘all they that loue not Tobacco ...”

“... A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... recurring – to break out of their corner and restore relations with the United States. Women and young people, with their vigils for the American dead, express both an ardent sympathy for a loss they comprehend and an intense frustration with the stale taboos of a superannuated revolutionary culture. A raw and rattled US has responded with warmth. Iran, the ...”

“... is concerned. They turn the sickle side of the moon to [the] world: the globe to the other.’ To Stephen Spender she wrote in more violent terms, suggesting not so much self-absorption as self-demolition: ‘I dont think you can get your words to come till youre almost unconscious; and unconsciousness only comes when youve been beaten and broken and gone ...”

“... legal consequence. The IPC drew on the ‘famine scales’ drawn up by the scholars Paul Howe and Stephen Devereux. Their prototype had two dimensions. ‘Magnitude’ was measured by the number who had perished from starvation and related causes, and by extension, the total affected population. ‘Severity’ measured the intensity of starvation in a ...”

“... songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly longing for things unseen.Yet something about my fixation has ...”