“... a rewriting of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir of her friendship with D.H. Lawrence. Cusk’s middle-aged female narrator, M, invites the ageing enfant terrible L to her ‘second place’, a guest-house on her property, so he can paint the landscape; she expressly wishes to see it ‘through his own eyes’. A contest of wills ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one of lusty enterprise, the other of enterprising lust, set against the backdrop world of the stone-strewn, sheep-habited headland, the moody sea, the beckoning offshore island, the token tenantry of rustic characters, enigmatic, pragmatic, dogmatic, deeply enduring. Readers may detect an odour of Lawrence here and ...”

“... when the focus on the hinterlands of Dundee seems too archaically soft. Air-psalters and pages of stone Inscribed and Caledonian Under these leaf-libraries where Melodious lost literature Remembers itself! There’s a whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not ...”

“... the first war photographer to be killed in action. He was one of the many forerunners of T.E. Lawrence (who greatly admired Shakespear), each of them convinced that an alliance with his preferred tribe could offer the key to Britain’s problems in the region. Claudius Rich, the consul at Baghdad in the 1810s, deeply admired the Kurds and the more ...”

“... pieces, including the priceless alabaster Warka Vase, thought to be the world’s oldest carved stone ritual vessel. Thanks to George’s courage and persistence in preventing the sale of such objects at international auctions, many were returned to the museum (including the Warka Vase, in twenty fragments) before death threats forced him to leave for North ...”

“... the operator couldn’t find a record of a patient named Henrietta Lacks in the hospital, Lawrence hung up and didn’t know who else to call.’ A few months later, the information that Lacks was ‘part alive’ reached another member of the family. This second contact came about as a result of yet another twist in the HeLa saga. It had become ...”

“... turns the future king into a fish as part of his education in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and as a fish ‘he could do what men always wanted to do, that is fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air … It was like the dreams people have.’ Deakin, who comes to think of his journey as an Arthurian ...”

“... 1907 split, but she too finds Christabel’s underhand expulsion of Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in 1912 ‘a betrayal of this most magnanimous couple who had given everything to the organisation: moral and professional support, a great deal of money and countless acts of generosity’.) Robinson persuasively shows how the militants’ later ...”

“... undergraduate education, made up of Forster, Shaw, Beerbohm, Woolf, Strachey, James, Eliot and Lawrence. When Stevenson published a 50th birthday poem in the TLS, it evoked for Malcolm ‘a society of remarkable people meeting in each other’s burnished houses and talking about literature and ideas in their quiet, kind English voices’.Ironically, Anne ...”

“... young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly reputation in 1960; thereafter Banham ...”

“... an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by Philip Johnson in 1964, the second by ...”

“... of a craftsman.   Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone ...   Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story, holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and here were incidents in the legend of cousin Devadatta. Here was the wicked woman who accused the ...”

“... by disappearing. Meyers adds: ‘If he wanted to kill himself, why did he not do so in Canton or Lawrence, where it would have the maximum impact?’ The question is naive: a youth fleeing the collapse of his hopes might go – often does go – far away. I make the point only because Meyers argues that he, rather than Thompson, gives the ‘real (rather ...”

“... be more disorientating than struggle. Perhaps the only thing to do will be to use it as a stepping stone to greater calamity. Taking the family to neutral Zurich during the First World War, the 31-year-old Joyce received financial support from the Royal Literary Fund and the British Treasury Fund. He drank it away and spoiled his relationship with the British ...”