“... cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives.Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... little unhinged at times’). Yet aberration was something he appeared to need from her. D.H. Lawrence observed that characters in Hardy’s novels don’t tend to ‘develop’; instead they ‘explode … bursting suddenly out of bud … out of a … tight, hide-bound cabbage state into something quite madly personal’. The madly personal in Emma ...”

“... gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!’ ‘Madness,’ answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verkhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It ...”

“... one he could have shared with several contemporaries, Proust, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence among them). When he was dying of TB of the larynx he was fetching up a good deal of phlegm. ‘I think,’ he said (and the joke is more poignant for being so physically painful to make), ‘I think I deserve the Nobel Prize for sputum.’ Nothing if ...”

“... French penal colony for the similarly ailing Jean Genet: ‘I envisaged bringing him its earth and stone.’ As with Bowles, at the time of this jaunt Genet was dying, refusing pain medication in order to finish Un Captif amoureux. She says that in his early work Genet painted earthly hell-holes as his own form of secular redemption, and that when they ...”

“... at all, but as neurosis, emotional repression, the inability to love: there is much more D.H. Lawrence and Blake in them than there is Mr Marx. And of course a lot of Freud, mostly not in particulars but in the diffusely Freudian cast of mind – the ‘climate of opinion’, in Auden’s famous phrase – which, contemplating the whole range of human ...”

“... Byatt’s mother, Kathleen – drop books into the rubbish bin. I have to think a lot about D.H. Lawrence for some reason; I have to rebut the idea that there are no accidents in novels. It is pertinent, then, that I had no education. Byatt was freed into hers and also enclosed by it. You are inside its sensual pleasures. Yes, you will sometimes feel ...”

“... don’t have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy.’ * A few weeks later, I heard Lawrence di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, admit that ‘there’s been an uptick’ in violence. I heard Pentagon officials dismiss this as ‘desperate attacks by desperate individuals’, but I heard General Richard Myers now say about the insurgents: ‘I think ...”

“... 5 January. A lorry delivers some stone lintels at No. 61. The driver is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she humps pallets up and down the lorry and does everything a male (and younger) lorry driver would do, with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication of her gender ...”

“... desert air and the famous Southwestern ‘light’ – indeed, the whole Stieglitz-O’Keeffe-D.H. Lawrence-Mabel Dodge Luhan-Willa Cather-Pueblo-Cliff-Dwellers-Death-Comes-for-the-Archbishop thing. Maybe we’ll even see Julia Roberts. (The sun-dried actress – a fortysomething Roma tomato in disguise? – has a ranch near Taos.) Our hotel is right on the ...”

“... ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a philologist. He was Reader then ...”

“... the British enthusiast for the cause of an oppressed people abroad goes back to Byron in Greece. Lawrence and Philby, espousing rival dynasties in the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, brought it to the Middle East. But its more natural stage was always Mediterranean or Balkan, where buried identities or ancient unities of European civilisation could more ...”

“... the form of a watermill whose wheel actually turned, a bright red gobstopper (illegal), a polished stone egg. I was reluctant to let the box go – our new house was just a few hundred feet away in the same West London street; we had only to turn left and walk across the railway line with its barriers that lifted and swayed like a pleated skirt – but someone ...”