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“... of Louis XIV’s Paris made endless risible plans for the ‘French’ community in the St Lawrence estuary. But it is unlikely that any or all of this would have worked without an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry ...”

“... Their shared liking for new writing did much to lighten the gloom. Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence became valued friends. There were many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their ...”

“... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... of energy and his paranoia – Campbell resembled two other, more important contemporaries, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. And like them at their least controlled, he demonstrated in his life and work two basic points: that energy alone, taken as a human value, leads to something very like fascism; and that paranoia is fatal to even the most gifted artist ...”

“... them in the Forties. Though she would one day teach writing at Columbia, Syracuse and Sarah Lawrence, she had little formal education. In the mid-Fifties Paley became a political activist of more than ordinary idealism and commitment, rare for any American writer: she helped organise one of the first abortion ‘speak-outs’ in the United States, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is with the physiological and psychological limits of man,’ the IG convener, curator and critic Lawrence Alloway wrote of the figures. ‘These limits have been widened lately, with concentration camps, exposure at sea, the pressure of -45 gravities. It is to find an image of man tough enough and generalised enough to stand up in this environment that ...”

“... the ‘touch of a single tile’. Benjamin is not alone in using these metaphors; both Ruskin and Lawrence (who probably took it from Ruskin) use Rome as a metaphor for the imperial, the finished, the perfected, as against the multifariousness of, say, the Gothic, the ‘barbaric’, the non-Western. Benjamin doesn’t quite romanticise the primitive as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the 19th century, but also sensually and emotionally. The theory is perhaps a pendant or sequel to Lawrence Stone (a historian whose taste for bringing his thesis into the foreground leads to a kind of sexual historiography very different from Gay’s). So far so good. The early industrial world has been given a sexual potentiality: but what of the ...”

“... the US ‘on the path to World War Three’. Corker is one of a handful of Republicans, along with John McCain and Jeff Flake, who now seem more afraid of what Trump might do to the world than of what he might do to them. What sort of war does Trump risk detonating? The most frightening scenario is war between ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘the Dotard’ (as Kim ...”

“... author in successive novels defiantly parade his period recidivism: grey-flecked beard, shades and Lawrence of Arabia head-towel for the Saudi arms’ dealer look, sun-bleached chest-curls for the stroller in Mediterranean gardens; Wild Bunch outrider, Slim Pickens or Chill Wills with badlands barbering. Moorcock has more hats than Winston Churchill. He ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... family imploded. Her mother fell ill with TB, her father delegated home life to the 14-year-old John and chaos ensued. In some ways it was liberating, as Boty recalled in the long interview she gave in 1965 to Nell Dunn for her book Talking to Women. With her mother in hospital or at home bedridden there was ‘a fantastic amount of freedom’, but there ...”

“... through a plunger-mute: why don’t somebody give a poor ol’ trombonist a hand or seat? In ‘John Hardy’s Wife’, the characteristically smooth ensemble performance is suddenly interrupted by the agitated, antic, plunger-driven and half-valve squawking of Rex Stewart as Hardy’s hen-pecking wife (the title draws on the band’s own name for a ...”