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“... Apart from the sense it gives of having been thrown together with a pitchfork (in the phrase of Leslie Stephen), Biographia Literaria conceals idiosyncrasies not so easy to recognise. Coleridge writes in part to answer imputations about his marriage, but silently and completely omits from his life story any mention of it (or of the three children ...”

“... urologist, after retirement, had to be given ‘very firm encouragement’ to stop operating). As Leslie Stephen, first editor, once said, much of the value of the DNB lies in the light it sheds on the lives of the second-rate, meaning second-rank, about whom it is not easy to find information elsewhere. If we do not need it for Lord Blake’s long piece ...”

“... her personal character’. James’s view was not untypical of the masculine response of the time. Leslie Stephen, a friend and near-contemporary of Mrs Gaskell, regarded her achievements in much the same light as he would have done those of his own daughter; and Jenny Uglow is surely right to stress the implicit comeback in the Gaskell novels, which show ...”

“... described a typically bourgeois sense of insecurity when she recalled the attitude of her father, Leslie Stephen, to money: ‘Not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to writing a cheque, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin”.’ The ...”

“... and interest, and May briefly – too briefly – kindles to it. Woolf compacted her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and those like him, into a double-headed institution, ‘Eton-Cambridge’. (Bruce Richmond was, in fact, Winchester-Oxford.) They kept the cultural wheels of Empire turning, and were necessary, ‘like Roman roads’. The TLS was stuffed ...”

“... been famous (the great set-piece biographies of literary figures, for example, many of them by Leslie Stephen), rather more in the brief sketches it gives of characters whose inclusion may in many cases have been the outcome of some very marginal decisions. With the perversity of hindsight it is arguble that the original DNB would be still more ...”

“... I found out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than ...”

“... wife Fanny Osbourne. All this time he had been practising to write. With the encouragement of Leslie Stephen, he had had an essay and article or two published; and during 1878 he published the stories later collected as his New Arabian Nights. In June 1878 Fanny’s husband ordered her to return to America. Louis went on a solitary walking tour in ...”

“... is itself part of a long and distinctively British tradition. It is the framework Leslie Stephen adopted for the Dictionary of National Biography and thus one that Goldman – outgoing editor of the Oxford DNB – comes by honestly. The closeness of Tawney’s and Goldman’s professional paths is also a hallmark of this tradition in ...”

“... Victorian infrastructure projects: the building of the Forth rail bridge, or the construction by Leslie Stephen (himself a contributor to the OED) of his monumental Dictionary of National Biography.Ogilvie points out that for many years the OED wasn’t as stable or institutionally protected as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that ...”

“... much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her like a kite at the end of a string’. George ...”

“... biographical talent. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell grew up in the heavy shadow of their father, Leslie Stephen, who was not only the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, but also the author of a private memoir his children called the Mausoleum Book, written for his family after the death of his wife. Keynes’s mother had written a ...”

“... he’d discovered that ‘the object was to get the supernatural believed in somehow.’ Like Leslie Stephen, and like many Catholics, he reckoned that Newman was a sceptic who’d opted out, and was all the more dangerous for being insecure in his new allegiance. His History of England therefore strives to nullify Newman by pulverising the Catholic ...”

“... obscurity, on mortality and immortality. And then there’s the respectable nerdiness of it all. Leslie Stephen, founding editor in the 1880s of the original DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s ...”

“... a more ‘sensible’ man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s ‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it ...”