“... Lovers (for structural and commercial reasons, it seems, not to eliminate sexy passages – and Lawrence wholly approved). And it is true that he had an instinct for, and endless patience with, those who tend to be regarded as the better sort of novelist. He was the advocate of W.H. Hudson in the early years of the century, and, a generation ...”

“... the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by means of epic ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... for us squeamish art-lovers to accept, but much less potent. Speaking of trapdoors and false fire, Lawrence Lipking regrets that Mozart should have ‘spent his genius on an outmoded moral relic, thrilling but not serious’, yet old myths are serious, and they die hard. To get his Faust off the hook, it took Goethe something like a verbal quibble, and then ...”

“... job as vicar of Doncaster. Not until 1964, when Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds, was it revealed that Vaughan had resigned in order to avoid prosecution for sexual offences with a pupil. As late as 1955, in his essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, Noël Annan was writing (probably with a knowing wink at fellow ...”

“... John Mortimer’s book has a thoroughly misleading title. It is designed to enlist a little pathetic sympathy for someone carried along like a piece of flotsam without the courage or determination to strike out for the shore. It would be difficult – judging from the book itself – to find anyone less shipwrecked than John Mortimer and less likely to pursue this policy if shipwrecked ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over their heads, the clouds and the trees’ – which might have been written by Olga, by D.H. Lawrence on an off-day, or by Pasternak himself. He could be equally rapt and romantic in his egotism about a hero who is often uncomfortably like ‘the most unforgettable character I have met’, especially when his creator announces calmly that Zhivago’s ...”

“... half these texts have already been published elsewhere, as the New York University Scrolls scholar Lawrence Schiffman has noted, so the rubric would be defensible only if the Eisenman and Wise interpretation were the first to qualify as ‘complete’. Then there is the question of whether many of these really are ‘key’ texts and whether they have been ...”

“... Cheered on by the Tory faithful, John Major recently dismissed as ‘claptrap’ a letter signed by 500 university teachers of English attacking the proposed revisions to the National Curriculum. The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel ...”

“... was hardly Simonides. H.D., meanwhile, was being courted by another young poet, the American John Cournos, to whom she wrote in 1916, ‘If love of me – absolute and terrible and hopeless love – is going to help you to write – then love me’; but she made clear that ‘the great and tender and bitter Greek love is beyond my love for you.’ In ...”

“... Meanwhile he was supposed to be studying English literature at Oxford, where he befriended T.E. Lawrence, whose wartime adventures Graves was to relate in a rather Boy’s-Own style in Lawrence and the Arabs (1927). In the early 1920s he and Lawrence planned their very own Boy’s Own ...”

“... continues after his death. This occurs in a very obvious sense in relation to an artist like D.H. Lawrence, but in a much more subtle and peculiar sense it is true of a great poet-artist like Pasternak. The tradition in English is different: the greatness in poetry of a Yeats or an Eliot, however complex a matter, does not depend directly on their ...”

“... some tufts of wool and dried grasses. Dr Johnson’s famous description of them in 1771, which Lawrence Freedman uses to open this history, has scarcely been challenged: a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not even southern savages have dignified with habitation; where ...”