“... Clearly, the latter, though they are one to whom everyone is keen to pretend to defer. When John Reid, the health secretary, was discussing his reasons for not wanting to ban smoking in public places, he said he ‘worried about the unanimity of middle-class health professionals’ on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were ...”

“... irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts the petty-bourgeois boot into patrician dons, revealed just what kind of talk remains unacceptable in a ...”

“... yet that is not the case here. Reading the novel, one is convinced that Morgan, no less than D.H. Lawrence, believes exactly what his style says, and this is curiously impressive. The difficulty is that though he may deeply believe it as a man, the style can still sound equivocal because of his well-bred English persona, the image of a spiritual ...”

“... Museum at Christchurch; a marvellous one on a 90-year-old mountaineer who had known D. H. Lawrence? Terrible young man. Ran away with my friend Weekley’s wife. An elegy on the poet’s father keeps company with a long story poem, ‘An Abominable Temper’, about a 19th-century judge in the Native Land Court, writing to his daughter Ada. Enclosing ...”

“... any way resembling it – in fact, they have never wanted to see it at all. Seeing it was left to Lawrence in Kangaroo, which generous Aussies will tell you is the best thing ever written about Australia, but which would never have been written by a native. The result is that these Australian short stories are not ‘Australian’ at all. As Murray Bail ...”

“... of Reuters watched a Russian helicopter brought down by fire next to him, and his colleague Lawrence Sheets – one of these reporters whom danger attracts as magnets do iron filings – appeared to spend all his time in the firing lines, as did the remarkable Anatole Lieven of the Times. The freelance photographers, the SAS of the press corps, were in ...”

“... reason is concerned by its nature with values as such: they are its proper subject-matter. Gavin Lawrence arrives at a similar position, though in a more diffuse way and at greater length. It is odd that he makes no mention of Quinn’s work in view of the similarity between them and the fact that they were colleagues until Warren’s tragic early death by ...”

“... the people. It’s in the poems. The October day I stopped for lunch I found her reading some of Lawrence’s letters, which she compares with Keats’s. Miss Niedecker lives in terms of the communications from Zukofsky and a few others. Besides her writing and her extensive reading, she works at the local hospital for support. She is a frail person, like ...”

“... Cornwell (she whose ‘bum’ was recently the subject of a libel action) is the model for John le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl and ‘the daughter of a fraudulent businessman’, or even that Dorothy Brett did on two occasions go to bed with D.H. Lawrence only to be told (twice): ‘It’s no good. Your pubes are ...”

“... Lawrence was attracted to Arabia by what he called ‘the Arab gospel of bareness’, as well as by his desire to play the Middle East version of the Great Game. The present generation of adventurers are simply there for the money. The doctors and nurses, teachers and businessmen, truck-drivers and skilled workers who flock to ‘Saudi’ in search of markets or higher incomes would be the last people to dress up in Arab costume or to subject themselves to the austere rules of the desert ...”

“... great landscapists Turner and Constable were developing their mature styles, the suave portraitist Lawrence and the startling fantasist Fuseli were at the height of their powers, and that embarrassing outsider William Blake was issuing book after book of illuminated prophecy. Farington himself was not a major participant in this rich flowering: his ...”

“... while her grand-mother, Laura Chanler, is ‘Mama’. ‘Mama’ married Stanford White’s son Lawrence (‘Papa’). So ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ are Lessard’s grandparents. They had eight children, one of whom is Lessard’s mother – referred to as ‘my mother’. Her father is ‘Dad’; rather a come-down. Dad is a composer and comes from a ...”

“... as an author photograph of him in existence, and such information as there is is recycled from John Fowles’s fighting introduction to this, his only book.) For a time in the 1920s he promised to be a literary figure, ‘the next D.H. Lawrence’ and then Lawrence’s intended ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”