“... chancel of the main body of the church. One effigy was engraved in brass, another was carved in stone and painted, while the couple in the chancel were carved out of alabaster. The church had been built for them and in my mind they formed the real congregation.On weekdays I was able to make rubbings of the brass knight, starting with his face, with a ...”

“... come about: the wonder is that it has come about at all. Fifty-eight years have passed since Major Lawrence Grand launched his ‘Section D’ in a niche of the old War Office, which had concluded, quite privately in the wake of the Munich sell-out of the Czechs, that a war with Hitler’s Germany would be unavoidable, in which case several European countries ...”

“... becomes a ‘cosmopolitan lisping no-good’; Yeats turns into ‘old gyre-and-grumble’. Only Lawrence, Larkin’s earliest ‘touchstone against the false’, survives more or less intact. It would be easy enough, then, to argue that – fun and games aside – the really important revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon ...”

“... it is only a spectral presence. Woolf’s thinking was done more often on downland than paving stone. Wade must have been tempted to beef up the London part of her life with some of her city evocations, but I’m glad she didn’t succumb. The street-haunting essay is fascinating about the glide of the writer’s eye; less so about anything on which the ...”

“... Still, Carr’s Dostoevsky survives in a way that the effusions on the subject of Lawrence, Gide or even Berdyaev do not, and his evocation of the Dostoevskian ‘double’ (Zosima/Ferapont or Ivan/Smerdyakov) has never been bettered. Carr’s other outstanding book of this period is The Romantic Exiles (1933). It is extraordinary that he ...”

“... she found one whose black enamel was coming off and got to work. After cleaning the hairpin with a stone, she spent a full twenty minutes trying to write on herself, but the background ‘material’ wasn’t as flat as she would have liked – a rib was in the way. She only got as far as ‘V’ before she started bleeding profusely. Still, it was a ‘very ...”

“... looked up, and replied sweetly: ‘You’re going to help me escape.’ The man’s name was Lawrence Schiller. And he did help Gilmore escape: he took him to the world, over the tops of the Mormon hills and the mobile homes of Utah, he flew with the story of Gary Gilmore. He produced the television film, sold the interviews, oversaw pictures, advised on ...”

“... actions’, suggests that these actions were hardly likely to be very perverse. Battestin cites Lawrence Stone to the effect that in crowded country households in the 18th century, some intimacies between siblings which we might now think precocious were freely permitted and ‘even, in some families, a source of amusement’. In that context, the ...”

“... raw material that is wonderful but the discoveries it made possible. The replica of the Rosetta Stone one is invited to touch has the magic of a relic, but it is not a thing of beauty; the copying of inscriptions and the untangling of hieroglyphs and syllabaries make for an exciting narrative, but the working papers and cylinder seals on show are visually ...”

“... the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one. Other poets have written of ...”

“... the plot allusions everybody talks about. What lies behind both is an idea of the novel as what Lawrence called the one bright book of life – a source of truth and otherworldliness and prophecy. As with Lawrence, it can all go wrong. One particular and glaring failure is prompted by Forster’s famous passage describing ...”

“... and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars – complete with a beanery in nearby Bozeman, owned and ...”

“... life move by, majestic and dazzling … He gazes at the landscape of the great city, landscapes of stone.’ From this, comes a further generalisation: ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.’I was often put in mind of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ while reading ...”

“... made them all. Prospero’s words are appropriate. Lutyens’s preference for bricks and timber, stone and slate, rather than for steel and concrete, plate-glass and box girders, betokened a greater affinity with the world and values of Renaissance humanism than with the utilitarian impersonality of the Welfare State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the ...”

“... enough you can buy yourself in at the top as a ‘pay driver’. In 2017 the Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll paid $80 million to Williams to let his son Lance race for them. For the 2019 season Lawrence bought his own team. That Lance is not the slowest driver in the paddock – he came 12th in the ...”