“... by none until her return to her native country after almost a half-century of absence. Lawrence, in exile, remained British to the core; Joyce took Dublin in his back pocket wherever he went. Stead becomes absorbed into the rhythms of life wherever she finds herself. Furthermore, although she has always written from a profound consciousness of what ...”

“... than thirty men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles ...”

“... he would rather be a free spirit than a son of the ancient gods. Unlike the fiction of a D.H. Lawrence, there is no hint here of the primitivist belief that the Aztecs could return or that a post-Columbian age might be at hand. Instead, Fuentes prints a few lines of dialogue (incomprehensible to the reader) in an Indian, possibly an Aztec language. It is ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... is the younger ones who have the besoin de la fatalité, and are struck down by the Gods, as D.H. Lawrence said, as if in saga or tragedy. In Germany the memories of many of these innocents were revived by the Nazi movement. Walter Flex was the archetypal wandervogel, who, although he rejoiced in 1914 to be ‘one of the holy horde which sacrifices itself for ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”

“... than two hundred Party-linked or sympathetic periodicals. By far the most successful of these were Robert Blatchford’s Clarion and A.R. Orage’s New Age. The Clarion’s pitch was working-class and almost aggressively non-intellectual – entirely unlike anything Shaw or the Webbs might wish to emulate. If the early Statesman had a model, it was the ...”

“... in the fields of edifying tediousness; Sir Charles Grandison, Coelebs in Search of a Wife and Robert Elsmere, fallen favourites; bored heroines in Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Brontë; Victorian boredom in Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope; modern boredom in Eliot, James, Waugh, Lawrence, Stein, Brookner, Berryman, Barthelme ...”

“... trip. Perhaps it was always unlikely that someone whose models were Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Tzara, Robert Walser and Gottfried Benn would win prizes, honours or even a sizeable readership in Britain or the US. And his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased ...”

“... He replaced the glorious monsters of his early days at the club – Vieira, Petit, Sol Campbell, Robert Pirès, Freddie Ljungberg, the otherworldly Thierry Henry – with endless tiny midfielders and not very good defenders. From 2006 until 2015, he actively refused to buy a goalkeeper. He seemed wilfully blind to the massive hole in the midfield that ...”

“... campaigned against a scheme of sending the ‘Black poor’ on London’s streets to Sierra Leone. Robert Wedderburn, born in Jamaica, became a celebrated preacher and orator; his was an uncompromising Black voice. He linked political radicalism with abolitionism and threatened British slave owners with the fate suffered by French planters in the Haitian ...”

“... and ‘absurd’ entered into common usage. One of Jeremy’s heroes was the war photographer Robert Capa, who had been blown up by a mine in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 41. The ideal life, we often joked, would have been to have spent the Twenties drinking with Fitzgerald and then been killed in Spain alongside John Cornford and Julian Bell. Jeremy ...”

“... the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new possibilities for human freedom. In the middle of all this wandered the poet, socialist, free-thinker and sexual rebel Edward Carpenter, who became one of the ...”

“... the French in 1759, General Wolfe read Gray’s Elegy aloud to his officers as they crossed the St Lawrence River. ‘I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow,’ he is supposed to have said. Presumably his men didn’t suddenly start to worry that they were being led into combat by some absurd literary ...”

“... were a ‘deadly’ compound of ‘credulity, superstition and fanaticism’. Robert Burton’s visions of religious madness as a satanic pandemic, a commonplace in Tudor and Stuart England, seemed increasingly incomprehensible to those ‘rational’ 18th-century Christians unconvinced of direct divine (let alone diabolic) intervention in ...”