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“... are probably (bar the Royals) one of the most well-known families in Britain.’ Andrew Stephen’s book has added to this celebrity. So have the newspaper stories about his story. For three long weeks the Observer carried huge chunks of this tiny book. Their estimate of the story which was most likely to attract readers was the same as ...”

“... took place despite the potent opposition of Oswald’s sisters-in-law, who were caring for Andrew and Stephen. Elsa insisted on being called ‘mummy’. ‘Never call that German woman what you called your own mother,’ an aunt had insisted. Guilt and treachery thus informed the children’s first dealings with ...”

“... Before she was born, Sylvia Townsend Warner was called Andrew. When she was seven, her mother took against her for failing to be pretty and failing to be male; by the time she was 17 she was known to the boys of Harrow, where her father was a master, as ‘the cleverest fellow we had’. She described herself as repelled by the ‘devouring femaleness’ of her mother and as owning a ‘preponderantly masculine’ intellect ...”

“... by Bloomsbury – the books, the people, the scarves, the gossip – which led them to venerate Stephen Spender as one of its last links. Squeezed into a narrow bed, they would read Spender’s World within World together and admire ‘that entirely English’ set-up in which, Plante wrote at the time, ‘I fantasise having a place, even if that world no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that might detail the history of ‘celebratory’ integration in the homeland of Enoch Powell and Stephen Lawrence. The problem – or the hilarity – begins when one begins to read the code of honour that seems to be inscribed between the plain-speaking lines of the manual. One need hardly be I.A. Richards to spot the workings of this, but it often jars ...”

“... to politics – and how New Labour politicians turned to the Windsors – will have to wait for Stephen Frears’s film The Queen, out in September, which raises the whole sordid business to the lovely heights of the national history play. In one scene, we see the Queen (played with delicious aplomb by Helen Mirren) beholding the slain carcass of a great ...”

“... firm to Consolidated Goldfields. He has more to say about the two younger brothers, David and Stephen. David led a rackety life with three wives and a lot of drink. Blow gives him no credit for founding the Gargoyle Club. But he descrves some: in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, the Gargoyle, though a nightclub and not a café, was a London version of ...”

“... and English’. We might assume that Joyce continued to take the bus. (At 11 a.m., doesn’t Stephen Dedalus travel by public transport on his way from the school in Dalkey?) Censuses may not give you the heart and soul of the country, that’s literature’s job, but they tell you the circumstances of the population on a given day, which might also be ...”

“... the sad and a PR guru. There was Bach for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon ...”

“... The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning version of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats: When you are old and lost in memory you might, seized by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me ...”

“... sphinx without a secret,’ said Truman Capote; ‘the Ecce Homo of modern exhibitionism,’ said Stephen Spender. For his own part, Warhol was intensely reasonable: ‘I just want to be a machine,’ he said. There were many Andies: the Andy who brought cruelty back into art; the Andy who worried about ‘boy trouble’; the Andy who saw to the heart of ...”

“... rapidly once he entered into close partnership with the British shippers and grain dealers Andrew Weir & Co. Another son, Muhammad Ali, prospered as the chief executive of the government-owned Rafidain bank. The Chalabis were now comfortably established at the top of Baghdadi commerce and society. The city was undergoing a renaissance after centuries ...”

“... High Street Kensington – he lives on carpets. The Mail’s biggest human story, the murder of Stephen Lawrence, turned out to be one of the very rare instances in which the editor showed fellow-feeling. It wasn’t difficult: the father of the murdered boy was a plasterer who had worked at Dacre’s house. But there was more to it than that: Dacre hates ...”

“... contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known ...”