“... of a craftsman.   Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone ...   Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story, holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and here were incidents in the legend of cousin Devadatta. Here was the wicked woman who accused the ...”

“... and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an ...”

“... and Martin Boyd as well as the Hungarian Gyula Illyés; references in his work suggest that Hardy, Lawrence and Nabokov have also occupied his attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman Mailer and Peter Carey.) There was a hiatus of 14 years between the stories in Emerald Blue (1995) and the publication of Barley Patch (2009), the first of four books ...”

“... sons, described inimitably in the Autobiography: Her eldest son was a Mohommedan, and almost stone deaf. Her second son. Lyulph, was a free-thinker, and spent his time fighting the Church on the London School Board. Her third son, Algernon, was a Roman Catholic Priest, a Papal Chamberlain and Bishop of Emmaus. Lyulph was witty, encyclopedic and ...”

“... From there the scene shifted underground, to a huge cavern where Duncan found himself alone with a stone chair. Again he felt himself picked out as a king, but now fear joined the feeling of lonely nobility, a sense that ‘all things have gone wrong and I am in the wrong.’ The doors of the chamber would collapse inwards under a tower of water, and some ...”

“... more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops still stock The Complete Richard Hannay, with only the retro Orange Penguin livery to ...”

“... guzzlers of experience (Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, the Beats, and that honorary American, D.H. Lawrence); palefaces, the tightly-buttoned patrician ministers of culture, society and manners (William Dean Howells, Henry James, T. S. Eliot). Although Moody tries to ride the wild surf of incantation, he’s a paleface from a long line of palefaces. If he were ...”

“... funny old man’. He makes a pot of money, which he buries in the garden of his stone-built house: he expects the house to last for ever since ‘it cost a hundred pounds; and that’s a lot of money.’ The last, mildly fulfilling act of a featureless life is the discovery of an heir, representative of the true Guernsey spirit, to whom he ...”

“... for the San Francisco literary renaissance of the Forties and Fifties, though lesser men like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso reaped most of the credit for his endeavours. Indeed, one of Rexroth’s more admirable inconsistencies was that though he could at times seem inordinately paranoiac about what he perceived as conspiracies against him, he ...”

“... with an uneasy dismay at the urge to destroy they serio-comically encourage and release. D.H. Lawrence, for instance, was deeply stirred by Marinetti’s ‘purging of the old forms and sentimentalities’, as he wrote in a letter of 2 June 1914, by his ‘revolt against beastly sentiment and slavish adherence to tradition and the dead mind . . . I love ...”

“... The lives of millions of people would quickly get worse. Women’s rights “will go back to the Stone Age” and it wasn’t worth leaving after “all the blood and treasure spent” in the war.’ Biden decided to withdraw anyway. Foer quotes him telling another journalist in 2010 that he was ‘not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of ...”

“... her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to ...”

“... and valuable and very funny and entertaining. It’s most like – weirdly enough – D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, another book that gets its energy from poking holes in just the right places to release all that built-up sexual tension. (Carter had a lifelong love-hate relationship with ...”

“... celebrities (Salvador Dalí and Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson and Lincoln Kirstein, Gertrude Lawrence and Agnes de Mille), during which her sense of artistic accomplishment dwindled and her affair with Aziz Eloui intensified, she married the Egyptian and fled the whole vain show. That was in July 1934, when she was 27.Miller then spent three years ...”

“... myth and to peculiar uncanny tales, she finds illumination in the modern novel, quoting from D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Ford Madox Ford. Meanings for each of us are knotted into the meanings that others find in this novel or that play – a common wealth of thought unimpeded by linguistic borders. Shared stories – from the tragedies of ancient Greece ...”