“... with an uneasy dismay at the urge to destroy they serio-comically encourage and release. D.H. Lawrence, for instance, was deeply stirred by Marinetti’s ‘purging of the old forms and sentimentalities’, as he wrote in a letter of 2 June 1914, by his ‘revolt against beastly sentiment and slavish adherence to tradition and the dead mind . . . I love ...”

“... at its best published poems by Rupert Brooke and drawings by William Rothenstein and Picasso. D.H. Lawrence called it ‘a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice’ and gave them a story for free.Lawrence was 28 and about to publish Sons and Lovers when he asked to call on the Rhythm offices. He had ‘formed the curious ...”

“... and possibly ‘Imitation’, Jonson in ‘We Who Praise Poets’, Whitman and possibly D.H. Lawrence in ‘Felling a Tree’ – are discernible but never for certain, because so thoroughly assimilated and turned to purposes that the originals would not have contemplated. ‘Felling a Tree’ draws on the Romanticism of Whitman and/or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... speaker is right and the others, though momentarily persuasive, are wrong. I am thinking of D.H. Lawrence. Of course there are missionary novels that are not novels of ideas – for example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is animated by a strong conviction, but, if I remember right, does not ‘go into’ the arguments for and against slavery. And there are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her dustbin.She read extensively both in Chinese and in English: Maugham, Shaw, Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and Stella Benson were among her favourites; she didn’t like Shakespeare, Goethe or Hugo. The 18th-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber was to her mind the world’s greatest work of literature. Big subjects – theory, history, politics ...”

“... early in his career, even if the experience he was talking about was often pretty notional. D.H. Lawrence caught the whiff of this when he reviewed Hemingway’s book In Our Time and spoke of a prose in which ‘Nothing matters. Everything happens.’ Better than anything else, the letters show how much was going on in the Hemingway universe in 1917-18, the ...”

“... myth and to peculiar uncanny tales, she finds illumination in the modern novel, quoting from D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Ford Madox Ford. Meanings for each of us are knotted into the meanings that others find in this novel or that play – a common wealth of thought unimpeded by linguistic borders. Shared stories – from the tragedies of ancient Greece ...”

“... as well as writing) was brisk and matter of fact. You can imagine her reading Freud, Piaget, D.H. Lawrence or the first chapter of Ulysses (she mentions only the first chapter) and laying them aside to lunch with a friend in Lyons Corner House or to meet Mrs Dalloway on the bus going down Oxford Street. Her advocates celebrate her jargon-free mix of ordinary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and, by his own account, largely an expression of his humiliation complex. He had revered D.H. Lawrence, whose writings spoke to what Spender called a ‘lack of confidence in the quality of my own nature’, and then communism did the same thing, but even better. ‘I was impressed by the overwhelming accusation made by communism against bourgeois ...”

“... all over. A lot of us have lousy childhoods, or like to think we did: if you’re Kafka or D.H. Lawrence you can make the most of them, and turn all that guilt and repression into pure gold; and even if you’re not a Modern Master, you may rightly feel that you’ve succeeded in putting quite a distance between early defeats and present victories. (Note ...”