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“... is the last thing he proposed to himself in his Bloemfontein adolescence, reading Joyce and taking Stephen Daedalus’s intention to fly by the nets of nationality, language and religion as a guide. He is too ambitious to be content with becoming a second-rate writer (which is what the poems included tactfully indicate), and settles for a Civil Service career ...”

“... mostly around here: Basil’s, The Flying Handbag, Funny Girls ...’ I broke in on a young couple at one end of the bar and asked them if they’d ever met Christopher, was there a rent-boy scene? One of them told me that I looked like a detective. ‘Yes, you can tell us that’s your card, but how do we know you didn’t just get it from ...”

“... It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces ...”

“... had nowhere to hide. When the shooting stopped at least nine people – mostly adolescents or young men – were dead. Dozens more were injured. All were described by the security forces as ‘terrorists’. More than fifty others were arrested at the scene of the attack and are still being detained. This raid on the Rahman mosque was not an isolated ...”

“... A father​ is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Second, we now have a chance to rediscover ‘the man behind the legend’ and, in particular, the young revolutionary eclipsed by the elder statesman. We can see, for instance, that he was not just a young Turk, the co-founder, in 1944, of the ANC’s Youth League, but the driving force behind the movement’s armed ...”

“... been not a moral crusade but a calculated move to exploit a ‘market gap’. Or so I learn from Stephen Glover, originally foreign editor of the daily and later editor of the Independent on Sunday, whose book Paper Dreams* is a cross between a company report and W.E. Johns, a venture-capital story for boys: three fellows have a terrific wheeze which earns ...”

“... Decline of the West. Our generation of writers was, very emphatically and very consciously, ‘young’. We were not, before 1932 or 1933, involved, as writers, in any kind of political action, though our sympathies as voters were vaguely socialist. But the way we voted had nothing to do with our conscience as artists. Politics was to us, at this ...”

“... woozily against a bare wooden stave or prop. A dark-skinned man wheels his bicycle past two young girls playing on a landing. The floor of the landing is covered with tiles in a floral design – except where it has fallen through, and the tiles have been replaced by a footbridge of four-by-two. The roof of the building is also half fallen-in. What must ...”

“... golden hold-up. Confirmation that the bank is in new hands pleased the administrators, Ernst and Young, who claimed to have preserved the value of business operations. But if there was relief that the smart money could be tempted back to the bank, there was dismay that the old money has shown no willingness to get out of it. As I write, Peter Baring and his ...”

“... Stephen​ Spender had spent two terms as an undistinguished student at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest card in his hand ...”

“... dreams, and one rather dogmatic passage laying down the law on dream symbolism. It is a measure of Stephen Brook’s easy-going editorial attitude that Freud and his detractors are given equal house-room. His anthology is, deliberately, a miscellaneous compilation, containing, in addition to passages of the finest writing – the work of ...”

“... he had been estranged. Trollope, as strict in his daily routine as Anny was chaotic, welcomed the young women into his ‘sweet old prim, chill house wrapped in snow’. Tennyson was a close friend, and the Isle of Wight, where Anny and Minny were sheltered by the irrepressible Julia Margaret Cameron, became a lifelong refuge. Anny relished the island ...”

“... a willing betrayer of her country, but the innocent and warm-hearted victim of an evil spy-master, Stephen Ward, who passed himself off as a playboy but was in fact at the centre of an international espionage ring. In her salad days, Keeler was not a prostitute, not a popsie (a word whose absence from the world I’ve missed these past thirty-odd years), not a ...”