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“... horses), and made friends with his wife and many artists. She skied in the Swiss Alps, where her small feet seem to have been an advantage – they say women with bound feet had exceptionally strong thigh muscles.The brief periods young Eileen spent with her mother between her European trips are always warmly described in her essays. Yvonne would talk about ...”

“... but I doubt if it was a match for whatever it was that left entry-marks in its masonry the size of small soup plates. Two people died on the premises, their former neighbours told us. Tension was rising in the city. There were reports that the Burundian Government now backed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and was supplying the rebels with arms. It was rumoured ...”

“... Strathyre’. One of these witnesses, Mr Mathieson, first heard the tune … when he was a small boy. The others appear to have learned it when they were pipers in the Scots Guards in the years between the wars, but they agreed that the tune had not been played by the Scots Guards band at that time, and that they had only played it at dances, as a ...”

“... own book. He puts a new idea of his own into both of these books, and it urgently needs refuting. Stephen, he says (Kenner’s Ulysses, p. 152), is practically blind all through the book; his eyes without his glasses focus eight inches in front of his nose, and he broke them ‘yesterday’. This proves that whenever he claims to see anything he is only ...”

“... just joined them.’ ‘Robin, at that moment in the cottage near Skipton, was eating dinner with Stephen.’ Surely the art of narration ought to be a little less blatant than this? Since the novelist can hardly simulate the essentially voyeuristic pleasure of the Dallas cut – when we observe with our own eyes the switch from the legitimate domicile to the ...”

“... There are now two Stephen Lawrences. The first, the murdered 18-year-old victim of racism. The second, a cultural balloon with Stephen Lawrence’s image on it: a balloon so large there is barely any space left in which to think objectively about Lawrence, his murder and the subsequent investigations and Inquiry ...”

“... Mr Stephen is editing a little dictionary,’ a friend explained to a clergyman foolhardy enough to ask whether Leslie ‘did any writing’. The enterprise in question was the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London ...”

“... I mean very much more than a mere writer of academic articles, who contents himself with such small-scale productions while preparing the major undertaking of his next book. Genette puts us in mind of the traditional seriousness of the essay form, which, as Walter Benjamin recalls in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, was a major vehicle of philosophical ...”

“... In​ the 1990s, when literary parties were more fun, or I was more fun, I used occasionally to see Stephen Spender: there he was, the establishment on quivering legs, queer as a chocolate orange but safely married. (When I spoke to him, I discovered he could flirt with his eyes shut.) Frank Kermode, a great friend to this paper but never knowingly unmalicious, remarked that ‘Stephen never knew where he was going but he always knew the quickest way to get there ...”

“... of President Bush’s foreign policy team have even begun echoing those leftist critics, such as Stephen Cohen, who miss no opportunity to denounce ‘the disastrous failure of US policy towards post-Communist Russia’. Best known for his 1973 study of Bukharin, Cohen is presumably well prepared to imagine how Russian history might have gone if events had ...”

“... obscured, but the poses are characteristic. In 1931 Woolf agreed to sit for Bell and the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, ‘pinning me there, from 2 to 4 on 6 afternoons, to be looked at; & I felt like a piece of whalebone bent. This amused & interested me, at the same time I foamed with rage.’ In the resulting sculpture she looks alarmed and alarming, with ...”

“... statistics such as these Galeotti makes the point that for the Soviet Union, Afghanistan was a ‘small war’, a political vehicle for some, a misfortune for most, and ultimately ‘just another symbol of the system’s failure, to rank alongside Chernobyl, empty shops and mafia millionaires’. He explodes the myth about the total narcoticisation of the ...”

“... and slightly older youths who looked as if they were members of pop groups. We crowded into a small chapel with a Greek temple façade and an interior of dirty gray stone. At the far end – which was not very far – there was a hideous cough-lozenge-amber-coloured stained-glass window. The chapel seemed to have its own special cold clamminess, intenser ...”

“... what the courts are prepared to tolerate as a reasonable belief. The answer to the problem of the small critic of the big battalions may lie elsewhere: for example, in the appeal court’s watershed decision in the Simon Singh case that the proper forum for scientific controversies, however sharply expressed, is the academy and not the courtroom. Such critics ...”

“... shows a phalanx of unpainted male prostitutes, leaning on some railings. Watching for a cab, Stephen Fry’s Wilde makes eye contact with one of them. ‘Looking for someone?’ asks the lad (identified as ‘Rent-boy’ in the closing credits), and Fry stares helplessly across the street. Gilbert does all he can to italicise the moment, but since Fry ...”