“... the Lighthouse, the Hogarth Press republished this assessment along with Muir’s pieces on Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley, Eliot and other distinctively modern writers in Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature; they also published his second collection of poetry in 1926, and in May 1927, along with To the Lighthouse, his first novel, The Marionette. This ...”

“... a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block tiers’ worth of burned-alive men’ did. After the fire, Himes began to write fiction on a typewriter he had bought ...”

“... gay literature the novels of William Burroughs and Jean Genet or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or James Merrill simply because these works are superior, serious and consecrated is a rearguard action designed to trivialise the label ‘gay art’. It is also a strategy to recuperate for a purely imaginary if politically charged category of ‘universal ...”

“... gets mail four times a week, and I wondered if they minded. ‘It seems very reasonable,’ said Lawrence MacEwen, whose family owns the island. ‘I would even be quite happy if we had less. About three times a week is probably plenty.’ According to law, the Royal Mail must empty each of Britain’s 115,000 postboxes and deliver any letter to any of ...”

“... skin contributing its message of porcine affront.’‘They stink! My God, they stink!’ D.H. Lawrence summed up Lewis’s attitude towards his subject matter. The anti-hero of ‘A Soldier of Humour’ is no less cheerfully disgusted by his own odour: ‘This forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned gut-bag, with its two bright rolling marbles with which ...”

“... his cuffs trimmed with scissors’; H.G. Wells, vigorous but ‘a bit vulgar, you know’; D.H. Lawrence, protesting, ‘Mrs Garnett says I have no true nobility – with all my cleverness and charm. But that is not true. It is there, in spite of all the littlenesses and commonnesses’; Tussy Marx; the Webbs; Yeats poor enough to black his heels where they ...”

“... With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like D.H. Lawrence, Deakin is happy, in the end, to remain mystified by the secret of that invigorating power. He quotes Lawrence’s poem ‘The Third Thing’: Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”

“... hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most obviously ...”

“... the house behind them, a miserable hut of miscellaneous logs and tarpaper. But the art historian James Curtis has shown that the reality was much less desperate. There was no dust storm: Rothstein couldn’t have shot the picture if there had been, and besides, the horizon is clearly visible. The building was a disused shack, not the family house, which can ...”

“... Human Abstract’. The Vassar archives hold references to many other writers and critics – Henry James, Hart Crane, as well as notes on modern art and scattered thoughts on narrative – that don’t make it into Quinn’s edition, and it would have been good to know more about her selection criteria. Small quarrels aside, Quinn’s notes constitute a ...”

“... good casting. Willeford is adored by his peers and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.’ Quentin Tarantino cited Willeford as one of the major influences on Pulp Fiction. There can be something a little suspect about being so ...”

“... curiosity whose work has not worn well. ‘I think one ought to be downright cruel to him,’ D.H. Lawrence said, and many have been. Max Beerbohm was, when at a dinner party he asked Davies, ‘How long is it since Shaw discovered you?’; on being told it was 13 or 14 years, he replied, ‘Oh dear dear – and has it been going on all this time?’ and added ...”

“... as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture festivities in ...”

“... young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly reputation in 1960; thereafter Banham ...”