“... cut a strikingly beautiful figure, became Exhibit A for Imagism. In The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence figured her as the Priestess of Isis. Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock Ellis, finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at ...”

“... of biographies this really comes down to two: Norma Jeane: The Life of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Lawrence Guiles (1969), and Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto (1993). Barbara Learning’s new book adds to a sense of Monroe as someone in constant struggle with fictionality and mental illness, with the demands of men, and with an overwhelming wish ...”

“... Springs … golf … dildo’) with whom dish can only go so far. They are polite but chiselled in stone when I speculate that maybe Huma has her own Huma and the woman we’ve spotted is Huma’s Huma. So much more one might say about everybody. Yes, we spot a Famous Radical Feminist from Thirty Years Ago, looking crinkly if not altogether crumbly. We hobnob ...”

“... a falcon, whose right eye was the Sun and whose left eye was the Moon. Fashioned out of dark rough stone, this squat and sinister statuette concealed beneath its flat tail a tiny trapdoor which opened onto a dusty cavity housing the brittle yellow bones, supposedly undisturbed since the second century BC, of the original bird. Talking to Jack had upset my ...”

“... 1930s could throw himself into editing and publishing, as Edgell Rickword did at Left Review and Lawrence & Wishart, yet still consider poetry the core of his commitment. By 1945 this was becoming harder. The poet Randall Swingler, also a Communist, soon came to grief after returning from the war: the BBC shunted him into obscurity because of his ...”

“... and passages are gone,When nettles wave upon a shapeless moundAnd saplings root among the broken stone.Nothing now roots among the broken stone: the site where the house once stood is cemented over, as though to contain uneasy spirits in the foundations. It is a palpable absence, a warning that this is what can happen to ...”

“... are the colours of a hunter or a soldier – someone accustomed to soot, flesh and bone. Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the Marquess of Londonderry, hanging in the same room at the National Gallery, is a painting of a general dressed for battle in red, white and black. The passengers in the open-topped carriages resemble the voyeurs in Manet’s Bar at the ...”

“... ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if ...”

“... great 20th-century English stylists like Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Faulkner – he might have added Lawrence, by far the most biblical writer of 20th-century English – ‘there is not one among them whose use of language, including the deployment of syntax, even vaguely resembles the workaday simplicity and patly consistent orderliness that recent translators ...”

“... controversy to the margins’. There, pockets of Whig resistance no doubt remain – readers of Lawrence Stone’s correspondence with Russell in the TLS not so long ago might be surprised to learn the field had become so pacific. Yet even Stone has conceded the second part of the victory the revisionists claim. For ...”

“... subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text and another eighty or so of notes. No stone goes unturned, but the book tilts towards the early life, with four chapters (259 pages) on the last fifty (yes, fifty) years, but five chapters (351 pages) on the three decades between 1933, when the 16-year-old Eric arrived in Britain, and 1962, the year ...”

“... to fair eyes and brown hair by the 40th page. I lost track of the plot. Someone killed stone-dead early on by a lorry would turn up alive on page 100. The chaotic story was only brought to order when, in the end, everybody died. It was a vainglorious mishmash of Dostoevsky, Lawrence and Huxley – to name but a ...”

“... of her time who strike this Bowenesque theme were anti-Bloomsbury: I have in mind, of course, D.H. Lawrence and that great writer (and I mean great – if you doubt it try to think off-hand of six other great comic novelists in the entire history of fiction), Evelyn Waugh, even though he did from time to time get entangled in the golden folds of his ...”

“... and cynical race’. From Taormina in Sicily, where he was renting the house in which D.H. Lawrence had lived, he wrote to a friend: ‘Italians are just niggers at heart.’ Portofino, where he spent the summer of 1953 with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy, was no better: Everything became too social – and I do mean social – the Windsors (morons), the ...”

“... to the collager, silk-screener, installer, conceptualist, video-maker, performer, neon-signer and stone-arranger. There was much art babble, and newcomers were expected to provide credos of fluent obscurity. Flaubert once said: ‘The more words there are on a gallery wall next to a picture, the worse the picture.’ Flaubert also said, in reply to a ...”