“... excoriated by Yeats. O’Malley tells his story in cadences influenced by the early Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and American writer friends like Hart Crane, but with a dry assurance all his own. The heroics come through all the more powerfully in his highly-polished but economical style. The supreme example can be found in the closing paragraph of the book. It is ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... Octagon Theatre. One chain of events focuses on the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, Mr John Stalker, who was recently suspended for three months during an internal disciplinary investigation and subsequently reinstated by the lay Police Authority, despite the evident willingness of his senior colleagues to have him face a tribunal. The other ...”

“... work off their private frustrations and seek new identities. (Like his most ardent disciple, T.E. Lawrence, Blunt may well have been conceived out of wedlock.) The net effect was far from innocuous. The myth that the ‘English knew the Arabs as no one else did’ made it easier for the British to take over large portions of the old Ottoman Empire after the ...”

“... Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the dead, hails Gurney as a poet of ...”

“... the legs of a stool. That is why we find in his writing a tendency visible in Dickens, Chekhov, Lawrence, and Henry Green’s Loving: his own metaphors get very close, in style, to the speech of his least lettered characters, who in turn often use images that Hardy himself might have polished up a bit and used in his descriptive prose: ‘I were as dry as a ...”

“... the French in 1759, General Wolfe read Gray’s Elegy aloud to his officers as they crossed the St Lawrence River. ‘I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow,’ he is supposed to have said. Presumably his men didn’t suddenly start to worry that they were being led into combat by some absurd literary ...”

“... words on the page. One of the miniature masterpieces in Wu’s new edition is the sketch of John Wilson Croker, a Tory functionary and ‘a moving nausea, with whose stomach nothing agrees’. That’s one reason Hazlitt can’t stomach him; another is that he ‘affects literature, and fancies he writes like Tacitus, by leaving out the conjunction ...”

“... the presentation of ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of ...”

“... remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is Jeeves’s immaculate and unfailing ...”

“... or ‘academic’, gives itself up to unconnected whimsies, velleities or spasms. At its best D.H. Lawrence, who did it best, characterised the genre as ‘the poetry of that which is at hand’, ‘the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment’ where ‘there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished.’ The genre can have its successes – we ...”

“... For three words once, in 1987, Martin Amis sounded like D.H. Lawrence. ‘Art celebrates life,’ he wrote in his keenly anti-nuclear Introduction to Einstein’s Monsters, and then he went back to being himself: ‘and not the other thing, not the opposite of life.’ Before nuclear weapons had dawned on him – ‘I say I “became” interested, but really I was interested all along’ – it was not always clear what life Amis’s writing was on the side of ...”

“... he died in 1885, his wife, Belle, took Frost and Jeanie across the country to Massachusetts. At Lawrence High School, Frost devoted himself to Latin and Greek and spent his evenings translating Cicero and Tacitus. He met his future wife, Elinor, when she emerged as his chief rival for class valedictorian. She introduced him to her favourite English ...”

“... registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable ...”

“... phenomenon is so striking that it has been exhaustively chronicled; and an inevitable drawback to John Lehmann’s survey of The English Poets of the First World War is that so many of his poets seem already chosen for him, so many of his conclusions already foregone. The excellence of the illustrations, the urbanity of the author’s prose, tempt one to ...”