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“... to get by in. Excepting one roundly mocked character who announces he’s going to be the next Stephen King, Pete’s contemporaries dream of artistic fulfilment – and perhaps an adjunct teaching position at a state college – rather than financial success. But perhaps the point is that the bohemian lifestyle has been absorbed into the regular ...”

“... synonymous with tutorial concern for the young. There were dons who coached the boat, such as Leslie Stephen. There was a college such as King’s, for centuries an Etonian preserve, where the young fellows had known the undergraduates when they were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable ...”

“... moment, Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose ...”

“... of work. After the enormous press coverage of A Brief History of Time, all the world knows that Stephen Hawking has motor neurone disease, can speak only with a computer-synthesised voice controlled by the few fingers that he can move, and fills the same Cambridge chair as Newton did. The 14 essays of the new book, together with a Christmas Day radio ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... The most arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as ...”

“... the questions had changed. He had started from some fairly conventional notions, traceable back to Leslie Stephen and Queenie Leavis, about the emergence of the novel form and how it was bound up with the growth of a reading public in the first half of the 18th century. Returning to his studies after the war, he didn’t altogether abandon this ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... show why its existence should matter. It’s just in the way. The proof helps us still less with Stephen Hawking’s question, adduced on the first pages of Jim Holt’s book: ‘Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?’ Mattering and bothering are important issues in Holt’s quest, but they tend to be treated as entailments and ...”

“... I recognised this, horribly, and I recognise, too, the underlying current that flows between Leslie Stephen and male authority, even though he was individually an unusual Victorian gentleman, not at all the more routine upholder of establishment rules, as my father was. I recognise the next part of her memories of him, too:It was like being shut up ...”

“... to them. Speculative pieces about the prospects for the bourgeois home were written in the 1870s (Leslie Stephen was the author of one), but none envisaged the elimination of servants. A woman armed with her Household Management did gain dignity by being the superior party in the kitchen; and Isabella and Sam Beeton make this sound like a real advance ...”

“... was as shifting as any of his characters’, until the great breakthrough late in 1873, when Leslie Stephen offered him £400 to serialise Far from the Madding Crowd in the Cornhill. It was a lot of money: Tomalin, with the biographer’s welcome nose for cash, informs us that a year earlier, Hardy’s cousin Tryphena had become headmistress of a ...”

“... latter was missing from the set of robes I acquired when I went on the bench (they had belonged to Leslie Scarman), and the lugubrious butler at the Birmingham lodgings remarked on this as he got me robed on my first day there. I said I wasn’t sorry. ‘Time you started topping them again if you ask me, my lord.’ Having to change into court dress is the ...”

“... Enlightenment anti-semitism, in that it is cultural rather than racial. Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, once observed that the high priests of 18th-century toleration are united in their hostility to the Jews. The 20th century is shocked by this, but there is a rationale, of sorts. They are against the Jews because they believe the Jews ...”