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“... 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 ...”

“... database, research grant and exclusive access to the subject’s papers. In the first a young Negro of high intelligence, great physical strength and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to ...”

“... He became a participant in the salons at which he’d once been exhibited: a social ornament, a young man of genius, an artist with all the necessary attributes – long hair, aquiline features, sultry expression and eyes that seemed to peer into one’s soul. Almost until the day he died, women found him irresistible; the number of his affairs is ...”

“... with some dockers in a ‘frowzy firelit kitchen’: This was Saturday night and a hefty young stevedore was drunk and was reeling about the room. He turned, saw me and lurched towards me with broad red face thrust out and a dangerous-looking fishy gleam in his eyes. I stiffened myself So the fight was coming already! The next moment the stevedore ...”

“... concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the last decade’. Young reported that the problem, fuelled as it was by media stories, was ‘one of perception ...”

“... stabs at the novel at the beginning of 1914, while polishing off A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and working more earnestly on Exiles. He was a heavy drinker who would nowadays be considered an alcoholic; he was penniless and unknown. He had published only a slender book of even more slender verse. Trieste, where he taught English, was an ...”

“... One curious thing about the volume, though, occurs in the copyright information at the back, where Stephen Knight’s contribution, ‘So Early in the Year’, is 2001. This can only mean that Stephen Knight’s poem ‘So Early in the Year’ (LRB, 1 April 1999), which bears a remarkable resemblance to its namesake in New ...”

“... Apart from Arthur’s seduction of Hetty in Adam Bede and Maggie’s near-elopement with Stephen, there is Tito’s pretend ‘marriage’ to Tessa in Romola, Mrs Transome’s ‘early lapse’ with the lawyer Jermyn in Felix Holt, Will Ladislaw’s love for the married Dorothea and the seeds of her love for him in Middlemarch, as well as ...”

“... up, about the need to escape a tsarist Russification scheme that centred on drafting eligible young Jewish men into the Army for 25-year terms of military service. I know that the Russian Government lurched between wanting to isolate Jews in a carefully demarcated Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb ...”

“... clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk expressed his pleasure: ‘Gee, a near-celebrity.’ No doubt the status of full celebrity was reserved for movie stars and ball-players. At any rate there is little doubt that Spender is the most ...”

“... Adecade ago​ , the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands ...”

“... had silenced it for generations.’ Not quite true, as it happens. In the mid-Eighties, Hugo Young did a radio programme on the law. Hailsham, the then Lord Chancellor, would not waive the rules, but Lord Templeman, a law lord who was effectively beyond his reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took up ...”

“... review of policy itself. Let me illustrate why these are not necessarily discrete categories. A young couple fall in love and marry. She is British; he is Chilean. Because they are both under 21, immigration rules, which set out Home Office policy, forbid him to settle here with his wife, who has a university place and a promising career ahead. The purpose ...”

“... are present in the title of Amit Chaudhuri’s intelligent and funny new novel, which follows a young Bengali man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by Homer, ‘noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without ...”

“... to know. He had met Denis Thatcher and Mark at an arms fair. He had several times come across Stephen Tipping, Mark’s ambitious and thrusting partner in the defence business. No establishment door was shut to him. Naturally, James was very right-wing. He’d been a disciple, he still boasts, of George Kennedy ...”