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“... dull, dull’. (This left its mark on her reviewing style.) The voraciousness reminded me of D.H. Lawrence and his friends in Eastwood thirty years earlier; these aspiring working-class and petit bourgeois grammar school children fuelled their appetite for change through the democracy of books available in the public libraries, balancing between highbrow and ...”

“... good reading, which explains why certain people will always think Evelyn Waugh a genius and D.H. Lawrence a bore. For the devoted toff, effort and compassion are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page. The English upper orders learned from Oscar Wilde how to abhor earnestness and embrace triviality, but even Wilde would appear strained next to ...”

“... Roger Lewis’s biography of Anthony Burgess, in Geoff Dyer’s nicely solipsistic account of D.H. Lawrence, in Jonathan Coe’s artful enhancement of B.S. Johnson, and we see it here, in a more measured way. Perhaps our present conception of personality requires something more involving than impersonal rigour. Towards the end of his narrative, Evans sets down ...”

“... their work: for H.D., her account of the Mother and the Maiden offered a crucial paradigm. D.H. Lawrence was similarly fascinated by her notion of a primal matriarchy (more properly, a matrilineal society), preceding the rule of Zeus and the Olympians. T.S. Eliot drew on her sense of the rituals underlying Greek drama, incorporating it into his own ...”

“... her by starting a relationship with her sister Frieda. (Frieda’s next husband but one was D.H. Lawrence.) Marianne and Else were at Weber’s bedside together when he died, aged 56, in 1920. Marianne died in Else’s arms at 84 in 1954. Mina died in her arms at 87 in 1967. Else herself lived to 99 and died in 1973, in the same home in Heidelberg as the ...”

“... taste as a reader – she loved magical realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras and D.H. Lawrence. (‘If I could write a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I would die happy,’ she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.)If there’s a whisper of satire here it’s never amplified – and satire as a genre is more shouty than whispery. Danlin’s ...”

“... a rewriting of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir of her friendship with D.H. Lawrence. Cusk’s middle-aged female narrator, M, invites the ageing enfant terrible L to her ‘second place’, a guest-house on her property, so he can paint the landscape; she expressly wishes to see it ‘through his own eyes’. A contest of wills ...”

“... over their heads, the clouds and the trees’ – which might have been written by Olga, by D.H. Lawrence on an off-day, or by Pasternak himself. He could be equally rapt and romantic in his egotism about a hero who is often uncomfortably like ‘the most unforgettable character I have met’, especially when his creator announces calmly that Zhivago’s ...”

“... and the girls will lift up their skirts ‘and get drunk’. This sounds a bit like D.H. Lawrence proposing that life would be better if men went round wearing red trousers, and though Hill is more playful than Lawrence, her crossing of cultures – Abu Simbel twinned with South London – is seriously intended. In ...”

“... Pound, Eliot and Marianne Moore (but ‘after a bout of syllable counting, to pick up D.H. Lawrence is delightful’), Stevens and William Carlos Williams (‘both inspire greater freedom than the others, Stevens of the imagination, Williams of subject and style’). Then Schuyler says that ‘Continental European literature is, really, the big ...”

“... younger brothers into the same orbit. Sometimes the new world and the old collided. ‘A Mr D.H. Lawrence came over the other day,’ Ida Sitwell wrote to Osbert in some bemusement, ‘a funny little petit-maître of a man with flat features and a beard. He says he is a writer, and seems to know all of you.’ At a loss to entertain his guests, Sir George ...”

“... always on the move. There’s nothing about Mansfield that’s institutional. She knew Woolf and Lawrence and the rest, published in the same avant-garde magazines, went to the same parties and talked about the same things, but the fact that her biography doesn’t sit comfortably alongside theirs, seems more insubstantial than theirs, is due as much as ...”

“... gained strength, and damped each lopping frond.’ This is the writer who meant so much to D.H. Lawrence, to Auden, to Larkin. But all my examples are pastoral, drawn from Hardy’s uncanny noticing of the natural world. Using notebooks, diaries and unfamiliar poems and novels, Ford demonstrates how Hardy also trained his eye, as Baudelaire desired, by ...”

“... his power to do so felt – and he remains always bored. There is a remarkable coincidence with Lawrence when George Eliot refers to Grandcourt as a ‘handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind’. I am thinking of the passage in The Crown (V) where Lawrence takes the snake and the ...”

“... draws attention to the fact that this meat browning in the pan is the same stuff that stuck to St Lawrence’s gridiron or to ‘the iron beds of Phnom Pen’, ‘the same stuff I am made from’: Here in my kitchen I am forced to look and listen. I cannot ignore it. Several things here get up the reader’s nose. There is the implication that while the ...”