“... he cries. ‘Most 20th-century authors, and in particular the greats like Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence, who regularly feature in A-level and undergraduate syllabuses, inculcate a contempt for ordinary, decent, bread-earning citizens, which must inevitably unsettle youngsters who are on the point of choosing a career.’ Mercifully, the texts are usually ...”

“... her thoughtless parents encumbered her at birth. King has her married to a ‘young man called James Monaco’ and this mistake is symptomatic of a certain vagueness in his approach to the subject, in that he never manages to elucidate all the myths which the lady’s posturings so insistently encouraged. Yet such an attack is indispensable if we are to ...”

“... history and practice of women’s dress was something he took trouble to learn about (this time James Laver was the inspirational figure in the background). Indeed, he went in for some grand theorising about the relation between waists and civilisation. Given the simplicity and, presumably, un-corsetedness of wartime Utility clothing, he got a peculiar ...”

“... He belonged, by natural kinship, in the company of high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over ...”

“... University Press, which long ago set a standard for editing novelists with its multi-volumed D.H. Lawrence. The extent and minuteness of the labours of Todd and Bree, both in this volume and throughout the series, are almost painful to contemplate. It used to be taken as obvious that the aim of an editor was to represent as far as possible the final wishes of ...”

“... Arthur McCash hands Nathaniel a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories as if it were a clue; Olive Lawrence, an element in The Darter’s colourful love life, is an ethnographer and geographer who speaks to the children ‘of Asia and the ends of the earth’. The children slip the leash of the middle-class conventions of their era, and escape into the ...”

“... Woolf and Robert Louis Stevenson appear in the first, short, paragraph of this book, and Auden, James and Flaubert have all made their appearance before the end of the second page. Re-reading The Uses of Literacy now, one notices that a work usually recalled for its intimate portrait of working-class culture is studded with references to the hallowed names ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the use of ...”

“... American school of physics, worthy of the best in Europe. One of his partners in this was Ernest Lawrence, whose efforts to split the atom with his cyclotron were attracting a lot of publicity. But by the early 1930s, quantum physicists already knew that the atom could be split with less energy through ‘quantum tunnelling’ – the Russian physicist ...”

“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... that which accounts for the civil war of the 15th.’ ‘Discuss,’ as they say in exam papers. Lawrence Stone contributes a long article on ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the 17th Century’, which combines the two subjects on which he is always at his best – architecture and the aristocracy. Much land to the west of the City ...”

“... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...”

“... life-style and because of the attention paid to women writers by the women’s movement. Joyce, Lawrence and Burroughs all had to undergo legal prosecution for their work before notoriety could be translated into celebrity, marginality into the mainstream. For novelists, inevitably, the art world became a model of avant-garde possibility. All the writers I ...”

“... biographies of Ellison which are useful in quite different ways. Five years ago, the young scholar Lawrence Jackson published Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. It was in effect the first real biography, and not much noticed, though it was a compelling portrait. Jackson chose as his subject-matter only Ellison’s history up to the publication of Invisible ...”

“... editing the one with a strong authorial hand and appearing twice in the other in the company of James Fenton. To be a love poet is a matter of tone, then, not of personality. The men in John Whitworth’s book ‘go in like whippets’ ‘for fearsome thrashes’ and ‘noholds barred’ – phrases from a single Kingsley Amis poem – and the vocabulary ...”