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“... 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 ...”

“... had got caught. The weather broke, the grave turned out to be Braque's, her shoes were a size too small ... Home and dry, she peeled off her socks and showed him the rubbed-red patch, about the size of a farthing, where a blister had formed, and expired. Fault Line There was so much right on both sides, Ken said, we could each found a church, and the people ...”

“... of the mountains, as there is immorality in the miasma of a marsh.’ His great rival, Leslie Stephen, future editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, put in a word for the morals of Fen dwellers (would he have defended the goings-on at Sodom, a thousand feet below marsh level?) but he, too, saw mountaineering as an ennobling pursuit, not to be ...”

“... a film. In 1994 a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand hills’, is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and ...”

“... adjusting them to its juridical and administrative systems’. In short, he is the patron saint of small-town power-brokers. Giulio Cesare was clever enough to hold on to power and prestige throughout his long life. But it is easier to leave a bit of land to one’s heirs than to transfer a social role. He did what he could: he contrived to make his ...”

“... of the Bayreuth music drama but as an exploration of sensuous moments, as if one were to cut a small square out of a Titian and enlarge it as a colour abstract. This approach shaped the wonderful songs that Debussy wrote in the 1880s. By the 1890s he had developed it into a style that nearly transcended the textbook completely, but that functioned on its ...”

“... of Henry James – or rather, given the horror of much of what happens later, the atmosphere of a Stephen King who has learned to write like Henry James. ‘It had always been certain to start like this. If he was honest with himself, he had to concede that he had always known it really, at some level ... He thought, correctly as it turned out, that his life ...”

“... orange tree in the grounds of the château. The King chose the orange tree, and sure enough a small chest smelling strongly of sulphur was found at its base. When Louis-Philippe opened it with a rusty key fastened to a turtledove, he found a piece of parchment that read: ‘This day, 6 June 1786, this iron box, containing six handkerchiefs, was placed ...”

“... parents return to Germany) and of assorted part-time jobs in his teens. His mother appears small and shrewish, Gertrude to a Morel not a Claudius, in awe of her husband’s animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary (‘It’s up to me to be the man of the house’), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It ...”

“... writers so rarely use the phrase ‘my husband’. Then it started to happen again and again. Stephen Amidon, we are told in the Contributors’ Notes, ‘lives in London with his wife and daughter Clementine’. Mr Amidon’s daughter has a name, apparently, but ‘his wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man ...”

“... misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors. Alan Blyth has recorded reminiscences from 30 persons who ...”

“... In general, the closer he is to epigram the funnier and neater. But Enright is always likeable. Stephen Romer’s self-presentation is not. Certainly, one comes away from Plato’s Ladder with a powerful sense of the Platonic Form of The Poet. The Poet dedicates poems to friends, has other artist friends, like a painter called Caroline (‘You are my ...”

“... and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of them. The novel has done its small work, come to a close, and leaves us with just a certain admiration for the author’s concise manner and manipulative skills. Rudolf Nassauer’s Kramer’s Goats promises a more substantial reward for the reader, as, given its themes of the Nazi aftermath ...”

“... 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 ...”