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“... Frederic Harrison once climbed Mont Blanc and found Leslie Stephen on the top. Not an improbable location for the encounter of two eminent Victorians: and they might equally have met in George Eliot’s drawing-room. Whereas Stephen was much the more distinguished mountaineer, Harrison probably knew George Eliot better: he helped her work out the legal plot of Felix Holt, a service for which she may have owed him more gratitude than we need to feel ...”

“... umbrella at Matthew Arnold’s, asks his friend to ‘bring it next time you come to the club’. Leslie Stephen, elected in 1877 on the strength of his History of English Thought in the 18th Century, enjoys the irony that this defence of free thought has given him ‘admission to a respectable haunt of bishops and judges’. By 1850, the Disruption in ...”

“... independence, while taking evident pride in its hard-headedness. It professed, according to Leslie Stephen, who became a regular contributor in the 1860s, ‘a special antipathy to popular humbugs of every kind, and was by no means backward in falling foul of all its contemporaries for their various concessions to popular foibles’. Clearly, the ...”

“... obscured, but the poses are characteristic. In 1931 Woolf agreed to sit for Bell and the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, ‘pinning me there, from 2 to 4 on 6 afternoons, to be looked at; & I felt like a piece of whalebone bent. This amused & interested me, at the same time I foamed with rage.’ In the resulting sculpture she looks alarmed and alarming, with ...”

“... dinner. ‘Everybody is either a genius or a poet, or a painter or peculiar in some way. Poor Miss Stephen says is there nobody commonplace?’ Poor Miss Stephen – Milly, Leslie Stephen’s timid sister – had a point. Soon they met ...”

“... the ones that he conceived to be part of his job. There was a famous exception to this rule, the Leslie Stephen Lecture ‘On the Name and Nature of Poetry’, which he gave in 1933. The lecture was a huge success, though powerfully deplored by some Cambridge dissidents, led, as some report, by Dr Leavis, or, as some less plausibly ...”

“... from the vital, affirmative spirit in which Lee has chosen to approach her subject. When Virginia Stephen moved with her sister Vanessa and her brother Thoby from Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury after their father’s death in 1904, one of the most striking, and freeing, things about the new residence was, as Lee puts it, that ‘no one was dying in this ...”

“... And now to something very different: Bloomsbury by association but with quite another flavour. Mrs Leslie Stephen’s ‘Notes from Sick Rooms’ is a reissue of a pamphlet privately printed in 1883, a year after the birth of its author’s eminent daughter. It is as though Mrs Ramsay had stepped out of the pages of To the Lighthouse ...”

“... In the summer following the death of Leslie Stephen in 1904, his daughter Virginia lay in bed, listening to the birds singing in Greek and imagining King Edward lurking naked in the azaleas, shouting obscenities; that same summer she apparently attempted to kill herself by leaping out of the window. ‘I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,’ she wrote to a friend when the crisis had passed ...”

“... you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham psychodrama and Bloomsbury libido. But some of the literary evidence he’s ...”

“... the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely the kind of detail Kenyon enjoys. Some room might have been found for Sir Henry Mame’s genius, even while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better ...”

“... Another time he had given up because his ‘work fell so far short of the standards set by Leslie Stephen’. But I suspect he was amused by a young man’s persistence and when, eventually, the proof stage of one volume was reached, he would call at the office, listen to my trivial comments, courteously accepting some of them, and then take me ...”

“... it critically, taking account of the literary attitudes expressed in the London Introductory and Leslie Stephen Lectures. The author of such a study would find it helpful to have some understanding of the scholarly work which was the main business of Housman’s life, since the relation of this activity to his poetry is of great interest. Mr Graves ...”

“... thank-you for favours received. Outshining it is Henry James’s letter to the newly-bereaved Sir Leslie Stephen, held up as an example of the perfect letter of condolence. It is full of sensibility, to be sure, but it also contains sentences best left unborrowed, like ‘I think of you with inexpressible participation.’ Among lesser names is that of ...”

“... awards one to ‘Bosphorus’, himself spelling it ‘Bosporus’, though when the versatile Miss Stephen spells it that way a few pages on, she gets another sic. And with so many of them flying about one can’t help noticing places where they are needed but are absent. Mr Leaska has written a long, informative and devout introduction, filling in much ...”