“... immersion in it – as only a detailed biography such as this can show. Hardy was not, like Lawrence, continually engaged on his own bildungsroman: but the wry situations in the novels, the ironic plots behind the poems, are again and again found to have their roots in direct experience, observed or lived through; and the power of the best scenes in the ...”

“... in art history, but Wind shows us why, in much greater detail and in a richer historical context. James Thornhill’s comparatively little-known versions of ‘modern’ life are tellingly invoked. Then there is an amazingly learned search for the sources of David’s Oath of the Horatii. The trail leads through Gluck, Garrick, the ballet-master ...”

“... In​ 1986, the art historian Lawrence Gowing wrote to Carolee Schneemann with a proposal. He would write a ‘substantial’ book on her work, but warned her that ‘I shall break your back with the weight of the devotion and the determination that I am unloading on you … You will have to hold my fanaticism down and teach it obedience ...”

“... in England, Travels with my Aunt. It was the Duke of Marlborough who introduced me to D.H. Lawrence. I found him younger and better groomed than I had expected. He was quite friendly towards my work. Or again: I was working one day for a poetry competition and had written one line – ‘Beauty makes crime noble’ – when I was interrupted by a ...”

“... No one could describe Francois Villon or Marlowe or Chatterton or Baudelaire or D.H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway as conventional, but what about Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or John Galsworthy? And, in particular, what about John Mortimer? He would, I think, indignantly deny the suggestion, but although he ...”

“... sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and installation artists such as Walter de Maria and James Turrell, and certainly the early projects underwritten by Dia, from permanent exhibitions in New York City to massive earthworks in the American desert, were grand. Among the best known is The Lightning Field, a vast grid of 400 stainless-steel poles staked ...”

“... He was indignant and suspicious when he heard that Graham Hough was writing a book on D.H. Lawrence, whom he himself had so recently and definitively dealt with. Hough must be up to something. In fact Hough, who had a perfect right to produce a book on Lawrence if he felt like it, was a good hater himself, in that ...”

“... working-class solidarity, which figures however abstractly or romantically even in 1984. Like D.H. Lawrence, Orwell divides his readership down the middle. In Lawrence’s case, either you feel that he has a depth and intensity which puts every other writer in the shade, or his male supremacism and mystical ravings make you ...”

“... attracted a great deal of attention in the United States. In the New York Times Book Review, Caryn James observed that ‘while the English fuss about poets’ graves, Americans gossip about litigation and celebrity journalists.’Malcolm sees biographers and readers allied in a transgressive and titillating conspiracy against the dead. She writes that ‘the ...”

“... say every stone was gold he dishonestly says that each one ‘promised’ to be. The accession of James VI of Scotland to the English crown in 1603 was never going to improve Ralegh’s position. Ralegh’s enemies had primed the new king to believe that he was not a loyal subject, and James had his own ideas about who to ...”

“... James Kelman’s fifth novel, Translated Accounts, is also his first to be delivered entirely in English. In the three novels he published between 1984 and 1989, Kelman mixed Scots and English, with Scots used to convey characters’ speech and states of mind while English handled action and certain, often more formal, types of discourse ...”

“... us? For Barlow Clowes, it was eventually the Government; for Lloyd’s, the answer is no one. Lawrence Lever’s book on the Barlow Clowes affair combines biography and City journalism. Peter Clowes must be at least faintly charismatic to have convinced so many people of his ability and rectitude, but Lever fails to convey this. On the other hand, had he ...”

“... the socially outmoded and the socially passed-over. The Criterion pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of ...”

“... of a fan letter), she wore a specially borrowed ‘tailor-made’ with an embroidered shirt: ‘Lawrence was from the people himself,’ she remarked, ‘and however neatly and nicely his sisters dressed, the one thing they would never have had at that time was peasant embroidery. That was the monopoly of the intelligentsia.’ The fan letter to ...”

“... of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both ...”