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“... In Politics and the Pound, Philip Stephens has produced a book which should be required reading for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are studying it carefully. They can legitimately enjoy the more egregious mistakes made by the Tories since 1979, but they should be sparing with their scorn ...”

“... by comparison, over-fleshed. In her introductory essay, Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre juxtapositions of Max Ernst’s collage illustrations ...”

“... and the fourth contains spirited appraisals of literary figures like George Moore and James Stephens. Poetry in the Wars is notable for its alertness and assiduity. Edna Longley is a formidable critic, and never better than when she’s proposing a revaluation of someone wrongly discounted, like Edward Thomas. The first two essays in this book deal with ...”

“... in a violent ritualistic dance until he could celebrate Frank Harris as another Shakespeare, James Stephens as greater than Milton, Dostoevsky and D.H. Lawrence as of the same order as Christ: and only a little above the lot of them, in ‘her rightful place’, Katherine Mansfield. There he could love her. Antony Alpers’s new Life, as he explains in his ...”

“... to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government … rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’Lincoln did not believe that the federal government had the authority to do anything ...”

“... forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right. The New York Times’s op-ed page lured Bret Stephens, a climate-change denier, and Bari Weiss, a campus agitator known for persecuting Arab scholars, away from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, then a few days later fired, Kevin Williamson, a prose stylist at the National Review ...”

“... of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... threats and intellectual gestures, seems far away, but almost as distant is the world of Philip Larkin, with all its equally carefully set-up shabbinesses, contrivances and confidences which only ten years ago seemed an exact and honest image of the way people actually lived. To the poetry of every age its dream and image of itself, but there seems ...”