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“... and Amis’s spoof, The Egyptologists, and a liking for pornography memorably documented in Andrew Motion’s 1994 biography of Larkin. Satire and light verse were among Conquest’s strengths as a poet. He also wrote science fiction, co-operating with Amis on five anthologies of new sci-fi writing in the 1960s as well as publishing his own sci-fi ...”

“... of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the findings of a previous inquiry, commissioned by the Labour health minister Andy Burnham and intended ‘primarily to give those most affected by poor care an opportunity to tell their stories’. Many such stories had ...”

“... one time, passing Laurence Corner, the army surplus store, he nearly dragged his UCL colleague Stephen Fender in to buy one of those aviator’s pressure suits with tubes going down the back. But he liked to pretend to Scottish parsimony. Jonathan Miller remembers the first time he sat down to tea with him at Downing College. Karl offered him a ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a little book of drawings and poems ...”

“... from which oracular ruling a hardening tradition has developed. A number of recent commentators, Stephen Greenblatt among them, state that the play was ‘almost certainly’ Shakespeare’s. Others are more confident still. Shakespeare’s recent biographers Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones take it for granted that the play was his. ...”

“... excluded from divine favour, would once again play a role in salvation history. As Weber notes, if Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress were to refuse ‘till the conversion of the Jews’ she would be holding out until the end of time, not because the Jews will never convert but because it is then that their conversion will take place. However, some Christians ...”

“... to the death penalty today,’ he says, ‘is the contemporary equivalent of abolitionism.’ Stephen Bright, the lead counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, whose archives were the starting point for McFeely’s exploration of the way capital punishment actually works, sees himself as belonging to a tradition that goes back to the early days of ...”

“... jury found that detectives didn’t carry out checks that could have prevented the serial killer Stephen Port from murdering at least three of his victims. The victims’ families believe that this lack of care was motivated in part by homophobia – Port met his male targets on dating apps. Detectives also failed to take such basic steps as running his name ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... and simply has the corpses pecked by ‘crows and shrikes’. Jean Calais – a pseudonym for Stephen Rodefer – is Villon’s most interesting ‘translator’. Running casually between version and imitation, Rodefer makes every tactical misprision that it’s possible to make. The result feels faithful in the broadest sense. Where, at the end of ...”

“... and his negligence as a craftsman? For Anglophone critics of Byron, led in our generation by Andrew Rutherford and Jerome McGann, reassurance comes with Don Juan. Here is a poem of the right length and range to be called major, written in a complex stanza and in a fascinating, difficult diversity of tones. For the American Hermione de Almeida, epic is a ...”

“... He locates the origins of The Jazz Singer a century before the movie’s release, in the age of Andrew Jackson. As the frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo emerged as national heroes for an increasingly urban America, so the blackface minstrel show developed as ‘the first and most pervasive form of American mass culture’, playing to audiences on ...”

“... nouveaux aristos: Lord Rogers, Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Welcome, masters of spectacle: the designer Stephen Bayley and Ken Robinson (who Bayley glosses as ‘in charge of lavatories, parking, visitor flow’). Jobs for those who missed out on Channel 4, Arts Council panjandrums, reality benders. A seat on the board for Bob Ayling, Chief Executive of British ...”

“... for an American public assumed to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently found, ‘isolationism’ wasn’t a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism – including those at home who were still committed to the equal legal ...”