“... Orage made him his assistant at the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female ...”

“... Romantics at the far end, going through some aspects of Arnold and Ruskin, to Pater, Yeats and Lawrence, Graves, elements of Eliot and Woolf, and down to Leavis, Dylan Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more ...”

“... her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... security of his readers. He added, still more provocatively, that ‘the late great physiologist, John Hunter, used to maintain (and I think he proved it) that the African black was the true original man, and all the others only different varieties derived from him, and more or less debased or improved. If so, what more infallible criterion can there be for ...”

“... we talked about books,’ he reports, ‘which in Cambridge at that time meant F.R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, whom we both admired.’ Huneeus was much impressed by Nostromo, Conrad’s disheartening novel about political excitement and hopelessness in South America. ‘Good God,’ Huneeus exclaimed. ‘I mean, the man hardly touched land ...”

“... of many of his acolytes, exemplified here by the arthritic jargonising of the American sociologist Lawrence Grossberg’s ‘History, Politics and Post-Modernism’, Hall pitches his tone somewhere between heavy-duty theory and zesty journalism, at once quick-footed and high-minded, showman and specialist. He is less an original thinker than a brilliant ...”

“... the law, doomed upholder of vanishing virtues; ‘hard, isolate, stoic and a killer’ in D.H. Lawrence’s description of the original of the breed, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking. ‘In a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated’ was how Chandler himself imagined Marlowe’s future. The frontiersman and the private ...”

“... the managers of the Farm Security Administration camps to writers, artists and intellectuals, like John Steinbeck, the FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling all picked up the idea, so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented: ‘A “search for the Mother” had become a major component of the “unconscious nostalgias of the Western intellectual”.’ The ...”

“... How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’ John Banville, Shroud ‘I had jumped​ ,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a moment later: ‘It seems.’ Marlow, the narrator of the novel who is listening to Jim’s story, says: ‘Looks like it.’ This is one of many instances where Marlow’s language is drier and tougher than his thought, which is unwilling to condone Jim’s act but very sympathetic to the difficulty of living with the memory of it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... political and economic interests gave new priority to the Near East, young men like T.E. Lawrence and R. Allen Brown, whose university history had included the crusades by happenstance, fought in crusader territory and then went on to write the crusades into medieval history. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire brought the creation of new states ...”

“... the intricate and mysterious network of connections, the echoes and reflections by which, as John Hollander demonstrates in The Figure of Echo, works of literature are flexibly bound, despite all national boundaries, one to another. Such criticism then hopes to reconnect the works to a social-economic support system wherein, on new frequencies, a few of ...”