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“... and lived to see night fall.’ (That’s from Waugh’s Men at Arms.) Then the first image: Stephen Newman in his shorts, aged nine, on the ‘most exciting day’ of his life – a day spent in the fur storage depot in which his father looks after Marilyn Monroe’s mink. The sun follows him to a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford: ‘It was the summer the ...”

“... buildings there. Houston’s Pevsner, and my main means of imaginative entry to the city, is Stephen Fox, a professor at both the large and unlovely University of Houston, where I am teaching, and the élite Rice University, which has a beautiful campus laid out by the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram just before the Great War; Cram’s original ...”

“... as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black ...”

“... the vote gets closer, even the Pope can be monstered, it seems. In St Peter’s Square, I meet a grey-haired nun, Sister Maria Regina of Jesus, who asks me if I’m a Christian. ‘I think so,’ I tell her. ‘Were you baptised?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then you’re a Christian. I will pray for you every day, for your body and soul.’ A gobbet of spit lands on my ...”

“... Barre at a hotel in Nairobi – he had at last dragged himself over the Kenyan border. He was a grey and uncommunicative presence glimpsed across the threshold of a room stuffed with antelope heads and hired muscle. He was putting up at the Safari Park, a kind of Tree Tops motel. The Presidential Suite, which would once have done Barre to a nicety, was ...”

“... at which it can manageably be renounced altogether. For example, when, near the end of the novel, Stephen Latimer declares that he has fallen in love, genuinely and for real, Miss Morrow’s response is ‘Oh, I see.’ Barbara Pym continues: ‘Miss Morrow had difficulty in keeping her disappointment out of her voice. She had somehow expected something less ...”

“... signs of life. Beyond this pocket of municipal endeavour buildings lay crumpled and sagging. A grey pallor seemed to hang over the town which somehow took away the glare of the sun. The warm wind carried with it the dust of bricks and concrete long exposed to the elements. On all sides there was evidence of indiscriminate destruction. A metal spiral ...”

“... be in the weapons business.’ Are these weapons dealers legitimate or black market? ‘It’s a grey zone,’ said Mueller. It may be no coincidence that the offices of a number of Middle Eastern businesses – airlines, import/export franchises – are located around the high-tide mark of Frankfurt’s red-light district. Scotland Yard, which was ...”

“... counselling session. Three women, one of them clutching a sleeping baby, and a youngish man in a grey dishdasha are sitting in a spartan anteroom at the back of the clinic. First to speak is Sabiha, still cradling her child. She describes how her husband was taken away from their home by Iraqi soldiers on the day after the invasion. A week later she learned ...”

“... mankind is a matter of comparative indifference. In the childhood of the century James Joyce alias Stephen Dedalus went out from Dublin ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’. What Joyce forged in the smithy of his soul has become available to others on easier terms, and the conscience of his race (‘conscience’ as in ...”

“... more effectively be felt to struggle for breath. The author’s humane values are looked after by Stephen Lewis, celebrated children’s book writer and member of the Parmenter Sub-Committee on Reading and Writing, one of 14 committees detailed to report back to the Official Commission on Childcare, ‘known to be a pet concern of the Prime ...”

“... Butters’s The Triumph of Vulcan (1996), which includes a photograph of the English sculptor Stephen Cox (born 1946), stripped to the waist, caressing the smooth flanks of the quarry on Mons Porphyrites. Cox was the first person since antiquity to obtain porphyry from this source, and a huge chunk of it, partly worked by him and partly by Roman quarry ...”

“... same waters so I kept an eye out while queuing to board. Then there it was! Like a range of low grey hills, with sunlight gleaming on its flanks. A sperm whale! In Oban Bay! Having surfaced it sent up a satisfying bush of spray two or three times. I couldn’t contain myself. ‘Look!’ I said to the woman next to me. ‘Look! There’s that whale!’ But ...”

“... begins to imagine, external description sliding into interior monologue: He drives on through the grey South London boroughs, alone with the grey samples on the back seat of the car … Switches his hearing aid on to hear the silence of all the colleagues who know what’s happened, but not what to say about it, the joshing ...”

“... 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 ...”