“... along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs from, say, Bly’s in that ...”

“... that he had no interest in modern art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation ...”

“... generation of writers is in William Cooper’s debt, just as the previous generation was in James Joyce’s debt’. But this comparison, justified though it may be, is bound to make the deliberately small-scale character of Cooper’s achievement all the more evident. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is largely about the withering of worldly ...”

“... ground that the trial would then appear to be too American. The chief British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, a Lord Justice of Appeal, was thereupon chosen. What he lacked in legal ability was made up by the British alternate, Norman Birkett, who in the pre-war years had been one of Britain’s outstanding criminal lawyers. Conot appraises ...”

“... stock heritage prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The founders of the sect were London tailors, and so was an early convert, the ex-Ranter Lawrence Clarkson. Another adherent, Christopher Hill (no relation) was a heel-maker. Alexander Delamaine, the sect’s first archivist and a former Baptist, was a wealthy London tobacconist, who left his wife £1685, a small fortune. Thomas Tomkinson, the leader ...”

“... and accepted it in a much less philosophical spirit. One of the paradoxes of emancipation, as D.H. Lawrence perceived, was that the bright new world did not include sex, except in bogus romantic form. But Daff was gay and witty, with the Pekinese flower face for which the cloche hat was designed (see Shepard’s illustration to ‘...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the deaths of its martyrs, featuring 81 types of torture in all, from the barbecued St Lawrence to the skinned St Bartholomew, who is said in different versions to have been crucified upside down, flayed alive and beheaded. Jacobus opts for all three. Often it is only after a long series of torments have failed to dispatch a saint that the ...”

“... Those who are allergic to such Parisian formulas as the Death of the Author might prefer D.H. Lawrence’s more traditional dictum: never trust the teller, trust the tale. Literary works have intentions of their own, of which their producers may know little or nothing. It would be impossible to deduce from Sean O’Casey’s anti-political The Plough and ...”

“... and then been killed in Spain alongside John Cornford and Julian Bell. Jeremy fell immediately for James Dean on seeing East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. A few years later he was even more passionately drawn to the Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski, who like Jeremy wore dark glasses and walked around beneath a dazzling cloud of weltschmerz. Like many of his ...”

“... and plenty to try tempers much more pliant than Macready’s. The diary of Drury Lane’s manager, James Winston, has frequent entries such as, ‘During the rehearsal Elliston got Margerum, Elison, Edwards, Tokely and Philips [actresses] into his room and attempted to be too familiar with them but was interrupted’ (1 April 1822), or: ‘The play waited a ...”

“... It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.             Henry James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there a history of silence?    Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Literary history? Can there still be people who believe in it – or them: literature, history, literary history? Are not all texts on the same level, just texts? Is history not something synchronic, merely a different way of talking about language? The views implied by these rhetorical questions seem wrong to many people, myself included ...”