“... includes a dozen of them, mostly in their entirety.Interest in his life is sharpening. After John Stuart Roberts’s compact and readable single volume of 1999, we now have Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s double-header, with Max Egremont’s somewhat shorter Life expected soon. Sassoon’s story has also reached a wider audience through television re-creations ...”

“... to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce to, say, Golding and Ian McEwan. Lawrence saw how much might be done in a novel, how free it could be of constraints, how apt to the business of making it new; the novel was protean, insisting on its own virtually infinite possibilities, experimental in its very nature. Johnson was fond of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... it is?’ ‘No,’ said the man, and he shook out his newspaper, leaving my father to walk away. John McGahern went to London in 1954 to work for a few months on the building sites: ‘When I walked off the boat at Holyhead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great English writers I had read and studied – I ...”

“... Harper.The relationship began to break down in the 1990s. In 1992 Ken Clarke, home secretary under John Major, announced an ambitious plan to reform policing. He described the police to Harper as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’: excessively bureaucratic (the Met most of all, with five senior ranks of officer rather than the usual ...”

“... comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the recently published Best-Sellers *, have helped me greatly.Other People was published on 5 ...”

“... 1946, only to be expelled by a reactionary faculty – he had dared to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the ...”

“... cloud at the end of Schumann’s life has been seen as overshadowing everything on the way, but John Worthen’s biography refuses idle teleology. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Nottingham, Worthen has written about D.H. Lawrence and the Wordsworth circle and makes no claim to musical expertise; but ...”

“... In bed​, John Berger was once asked by a lover: who’s your favourite painter? Caravaggio, he replied. There are two kinds of desire, according to Berger: the desire to take and the ‘desire to be taken’. Caravaggio painted the second kind. The desire ‘to lose oneself’, ‘the most abandoned, the most desperate’ form of wanting: this is what Caravaggio put on the canvas ...”

“... answer is no. The president should face some hard facts: his 3 per cent margin of victory over John Kerry doesn’t remotely resemble Reagan’s 18 point knock-out over Walter Mondale. Although 1984 marked a decisive victory over liberalism, last year’s election revealed that the most liberal candidate since Mondale was able to run neck-and-neck with an ...”

“... that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ...”