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“... He became a participant in the salons at which he’d once been exhibited: a social ornament, a young man of genius, an artist with all the necessary attributes – long hair, aquiline features, sultry expression and eyes that seemed to peer into one’s soul. Almost until the day he died, women found him irresistible; the number of his affairs is ...”

“... with some dockers in a ‘frowzy firelit kitchen’: This was Saturday night and a hefty young stevedore was drunk and was reeling about the room. He turned, saw me and lurched towards me with broad red face thrust out and a dangerous-looking fishy gleam in his eyes. I stiffened myself So the fight was coming already! The next moment the stevedore ...”

“... concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the last decade’. Young reported that the problem, fuelled as it was by media stories, was ‘one of perception ...”

“... they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked on his own biography of the sculptor William ...”

“... When​ I was 13, one of the things I liked best about Stephen King – my hero and bête noire, godfather of my literary children, internet mensch, unstoppable retirement-proof zombie of letters – is the fact that you could turn to the end of any of his story collections and learn, in an amiable afterword, how he got his ideas ...”

“... and one is never properly sure what kind of novel one is in. Apart from the narrator when he is young – and a mathematical prodigy – and his immediate kin, the characters (Mephistophelean, spivish Felix, the deaf-mute Sophie, the mine-owner and mathematician Mr Kasperl, et al.) are only elusively real – shadows on an indeterminate geography. The ...”

“... Stephen Hawking is now 50 years old, and has lived 25 years longer than he once expected to live. As a scientist he long ago earned the respect of his colleagues; more recently, with the astonishing success of his book A Brief History of Time, he has become a widely recognised public figure. Immobile for decades, he is now unable to communicate except by means of an electronic voice-synthesiser connected to a word-processor ...”

“... stabs at the novel at the beginning of 1914, while polishing off A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and working more earnestly on Exiles. He was a heavy drinker who would nowadays be considered an alcoholic; he was penniless and unknown. He had published only a slender book of even more slender verse. Trieste, where he taught English, was an ...”

“... One curious thing about the volume, though, occurs in the copyright information at the back, where Stephen Knight’s contribution, ‘So Early in the Year’, is 2001. This can only mean that Stephen Knight’s poem ‘So Early in the Year’ (LRB, 1 April 1999), which bears a remarkable resemblance to its namesake in New ...”

“... up, about the need to escape a tsarist Russification scheme that centred on drafting eligible young Jewish men into the Army for 25-year terms of military service. I know that the Russian Government lurched between wanting to isolate Jews in a carefully demarcated Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb ...”

“... Apart from Arthur’s seduction of Hetty in Adam Bede and Maggie’s near-elopement with Stephen, there is Tito’s pretend ‘marriage’ to Tessa in Romola, Mrs Transome’s ‘early lapse’ with the lawyer Jermyn in Felix Holt, Will Ladislaw’s love for the married Dorothea and the seeds of her love for him in Middlemarch, as well as ...”

“... clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk expressed his pleasure: ‘Gee, a near-celebrity.’ No doubt the status of full celebrity was reserved for movie stars and ball-players. At any rate there is little doubt that Spender is the most ...”

“... and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!’ He would write graceful follow-up letters: ‘It was very pleasant meeting you both and your charming daughter, and it is nice to know that Joyce had such good company in Zurich.’ Such a remark, Leader says with just a hint of ...”

“... Adecade ago​ , the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands ...”

“... had silenced it for generations.’ Not quite true, as it happens. In the mid-Eighties, Hugo Young did a radio programme on the law. Hailsham, the then Lord Chancellor, would not waive the rules, but Lord Templeman, a law lord who was effectively beyond his reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took up ...”