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“... right. The earth didn’t move.’We were on the ferry from Holyhead. The day was grey and damp, with mist banking over the sea. As we sat in the cafeteria, Karl kept looking out the window. He said he was trying to work out where the coast was. He looked at me and showed an expression I’m not sure he’s aware of having, a broad grin that ...”

“... were written to members of the Norton family.) With the Nortons in London, James saw Leslie Stephen, whom James’s father had also known, and met Charles Dickens’s daughter, who was, he reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal ...”

“... hardly cosy is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in ...”

“... of money, jealousy, hero-worship – and thusward’. He once objected to an exam question on Stephen Vincent Benét (‘I could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his ...”

“... Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would ...”

“... and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign ...”

“... of, in turn, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Vincent Bénet.When her friend Ann Davidow left Smith after one term, Plath’s first letter to her, written through tears, told her that although she’d come third in the nationwide Seventeen short story contest, ‘what the hell do I care about ...”

“... It’s all because they wouldn’t let me play football.Oh dear. You sound like that poem by Stephen Spender, telling the world how scared he was of the rough boys who threw stones.Please don’t. I’d better shut up.You could have been a contender. My point is you did become a contender.In a way, yes. I’m still pretty good at football, except I’m a ...”

“... shoes were involved I haven’t discovered. For long a fervent Wagnerian – his first name for Stephen Wonham was Siegfried – Forster came in time to regard the leitmotifs of The Ring as a bit blatant, incessantly directing one’s attention to ring, sword, Valhalla. He admitted to his interviewers that he had learned from the Wagnerian leitmotifs, but ...”

“... as a hundred – will have got away. It is a Sunday morning. Rain drives down on the prefab huts. Grey seas fret at the harbour walls. As the first contingent of shivering Kurds prepares to board a waiting bus, a dull church bell starts tolling for Mass. Whether they’ll live or die must, at some point on the journey, become a more pressing question for ...”

“... Quite simply it caused nearly all of the 72 deaths. ‘There’s a moment,’ the fire expert Stephen Mackenzie told me, ‘when the tactics have to move from “remain in place” to “assisted evacuation”.’ It had been obvious from very early on, even to spectators on the ground, that the fire at Grenfell Tower was not going to be put out, that it ...”