“... Mayakovsky’s name on it, Number 12. On the left you see across a rope barrier a tiny room with a grey sofa, wooden desk and chair, antiquated telephone, bookcase, trunk, small table and an old rug. The paint is peeling, and over the desk, at eye level, there is a small photograph of Lenin. This is the room where Mayakovsky lived and where, on 14 April ...”

“... must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight.10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig ...”

“... to the Utilitarians or the Pre-Raphaelites, both of which, in fact, had direct links with the Stephen family. Williams contrasted the Bloomsbury Group with the Godwin circle of the 1780s and 1790s, which he saw as a genuinely oppositional group, whose ‘rational and civilising proposals’ were ‘met by the crudest kind of ...”

“... Committee, for prurience and high-minded corruption. As a novelist she is herself placed in this grey area or combat zone: should the new Highsmith be sent for review to the supreme fiction people or to the crime squad? She capitalises candidly on these equivocations. Her studies of alienation are at once very literary and allusive and entirely untrammelled ...”

“... for the population as a whole. Sometimes I say I have mild gender dysphoria: I like my life as Stephen just fine, so long as I get to be Stephanie now and again. At the merchandise fair, I was shocked to see myself in a hairdresser’s mirror after I tried on a shoulder-length wig: I no longer looked like a pretend girl or a woman, like someone trying ...”

“... of radically counterfactual thought experiments. He acknowledges that this technique ‘turns the grey matter of some philosophers red’; but he simply cannot understand why, and so follows his subject in essentially ignoring the objection, even when it is developed at length by colleagues whose commentaries are incorporated into Parfit’s second ...”

“... atrocities in distant lands, any American official or citizen who claims to see shades of grey or two sides of the story, or who claims not to know exactly what is happening in the interior of a distant country, is probably feigning ignorance to deflect calls for action and to get the US off the hook. Some of those who declare murderous situations ...”

“... in writing or talking, never,’ she replied. The woman’s father, a retired house painter with a grey beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my family of nine children.’ Edith Swan, a ...”

“... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were ...”

“... at’? The prospect was ‘bitterness and gall’. He’d watched the Rock change from ‘a barren grey stone with its hateful grey lines and angles all bristling with cannon’ into a mountain of ‘most lovely green’, blooming with ‘cactus and aloes, fig and orange trees’, and then back again into nakedness, while ...”

“... combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not sure if we drove to Green 5 – the streets were getting quieter.’ The patrol was about forty kilometres from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled along a dimly lit ...”

“... Piper makes us more directly aware of a great architectural tradition burning up,’ Stephen Spender said. Piper – always, temperamentally, happy to comply – went on tour around the country to document burned-out churches as well as picturesque buildings deemed to be under threat, including Windsor Castle, producing a series of dark ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... aware of the problems but optimistic that they could be overcome,’ he said in an interview with Stephen Colbert. ‘The book is the story, perhaps, of how I was wrong about that … I couldn’t believe it was that bad … I thought it was possible to work with somebody. I thought surely they would want to learn about the complexity of arms control ...”

“... or dramatised dialogues is there any humour, sex or surprise. His writing conjures up fields of grey ectoplasm inhabited by plaintive souls. If Gibran is right about the universe, then we are all living in a banal and sentimental nightmare.He seems to be a favourite poet of those who don’t like poetry. Similarly, I suspect that Gibranian spirituality ...”