“... to a neat tablet with garlanded urn, honeysuckle ornament and elegant lettering dedicated to Sir James Burrow (1701-82) of Starborough Castle, a lawyer active in the intellectual life of Georgian London (‘above 30 Years Vice President of the Royal Society’). We read that ‘the Convivial Character was what He chiefly affected as it was his constant Wish ...”

“... there is no difficulty, as Thompson points out, in reinterpreting it as a Downton Abbey affair. James Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to ...”

“... also more impassioned. They know what it is like, and they know what they want. It is Henry James, of course, who exhibits at the highest level the combination of the practising novelist’s experience and the finest critical intelligence, but lesser if still considerable writers, such as E.M. Forster (whose Aspects of the Novel has proved so strangely ...”

“... those who loom large in this pantheon are Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Dewey, Cavell, James, Davidson and Derrida. At its best, Rorty’s writing has energy, humour, great tolerance, an exemplary clarity that can illuminate even the darker reaches of Heidegger, and above all a rare ability to communicate enthusiasm and sheer love of ideas. At its ...”

“... let alone her 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, whose experimental narrative anticipated those of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It’s an odd conjunction: on the one hand, Joyce and Woolf; on the other, Dorothy Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and ...”

“... advice about the very experiences he has never had. ‘Don’t be scared of being an artist. D.H. Lawrence was an artist through and through,’ he cheers his son on. When Vidia tells him that he has not succeeded in meeting Professor Radhakrishnan, who taught Eastern Religions at Oxford, Pa replies with a bustle of recommendations: I do hope you did succeed ...”

“... Walter Benjamin was not a letter writer of the order of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity ...”

“... by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and Vidals feel most relaxed: a milieu in which their kingship is acknowledged, in which ...”

“... Alfred the Great (who earns the mysterious plaudit that ‘there was something about him of T.E. Lawrence’) gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in ...”

“... new achievement is said to have entered English letters, going from Blake through Dickens to D.H. Lawrence, and centring in the novel. The admission of Dickens into the canon overturns the verdict of Fiction and the Reading Public and goes beyond the rescue of Hard Times, the one Dickens novel treated in The Great Tradition (1948). That Dickens was a popular ...”

“... confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish mood, asked ‘What would you say, Sir, if you were told that in a hundred ...”

“... literary criticism scattered about in his own books, some of which may be quoted. For instance, on James Joyce in The Dog at Clambercrown, which opens with Brooke reading Ulysses in the plane on the way to a holiday in Sicily: Ulysses, I suppose, is the most fascinating and the most devastatingly boring novel ever written ... I remember, many years ago (at ...”

“... handed the oversight of the continuing life of the dictionary to a third Oxford-based historian, Lawrence Goldman. An incidental but peculiarly fitting consequence of Matthew’s early death was that he qualified for inclusion himself, an entry done quite beautifully by his friend and colleague, Ross McKibbin. So what are the criteria for inclusion, aside ...”

“... aberration was F.R. Leavis, who behaved as if creativity had passed out of the world with D.H. Lawrence and could only be brought back by the grace and favour of his own writings. A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of ...”

“... but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has always got her nose in Henry James or D.H. Lawrence, becomes as fastidious about books as Hartnell, Mattli and Stiebel had taught her to be about tailoring, and moans if she finds herself on holiday with nothing to read. Her own writing is more in the ...”