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“... reason is concerned by its nature with values as such: they are its proper subject-matter. Gavin Lawrence arrives at a similar position, though in a more diffuse way and at greater length. It is odd that he makes no mention of Quinn’s work in view of the similarity between them and the fact that they were colleagues until Warren’s tragic early ...”

“... suspect him of a proud pose. By coincidence, Thesiger’s book appears along with Worlds Apart by Gavin Young, of ‘slow boat’ fame, who once aspired to follow him into the Empty Quarter of Arabia, but settled instead for a stint in the lands of Sumer and Babylonia, which yielded him a book on the Marsh Arabs too. Young gives us a closeup of Thesiger ...”

“... involvement began ... on the afternoon of 17 November 1985.’ The BBC’s Panorama journalist Gavin Hewitt, who is not an admirer of the Colonel, seems to back him up at least in this important detail. ‘Oliver North,’ he assures us, ‘hadn’t been party initially to the arms deals with the Iranians.’ So there were ‘arms deals with the ...”

“... through the book, in Patrick’s case during a drinking session with his unemployed elder brother, Gavin, and a couple of Gavin’s mates. Gavin refers to teachers as ‘middle-class wankers’. What do you mean middle-class wankers? said Pat. ...”

“... grew almost beyond bearing – a wonder and a pain.’ The novel also records the death of D.H. Lawrence. Aldous Huxley ‘flattered our intellects’ but ‘Lawrence made us face what was in the dark of ourselves, whether we liked it or not.’ Ned is dismissive: ‘Anyone could do that if they put in all the dirty ...”

“... mounted in gold by Asprey. When the ill-fated writer and Thesiger’s future travelling companion Gavin Maxwell first met him in London, he was startled: ‘The bowler hat, the hard collar and black shoes, the never-opened umbrella, all these were a surprise to me.’ Then there were books. What sorts of books did empire builders and explorers read? Those of ...”

“... out when it comes to what art can be.’ As it pans the miasmic waters where the Chapman Brothers, Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and of course Damien Hirst loom, High Art Lite finds the ark of art occupied, betrayed and shipwrecked. The principles that gave the avant-garde of the earlier part of the 20th century its energy and optimism have rebounded on themselves ...”

“... a train during one of his blackouts). Spencer’s reputation as a poet, like Robert Graves’s and Lawrence Durrell’s, has always been tainted by his association with the Mediterranean, an injustice which the Collected Poems, intelligently edited by Roger Bowen, seeks to put right. The volume shows how travel encouraged in Spencer both a casual, accumulative ...”

“... Apart from Thwaite himself, the few who are spared include figures like Vernon Watkins, Gavin Ewart, Barbara Pym: allies who are genuinely liked and admired but who are nonetheless junior to Larkin in talent and repute. The really big hates tend to be reserved for sizable poetic rivals. Ted Hughes is a recurrent, near-obsessive target, with ...”

“... No doubt the modish thing today would be to give Betjeman the same label that has been stuck on Gavin Ewart: ‘a deeply serious poet’. That is the mechanical accolade, the last infirmity of contemporary clichés. Its irrelevance consists in the fact that no good poetry can be other than serious, whereas poetry written to be serious today is seldom ...”

“... commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples: Lutyens made them all. Prospero’s ...”

“... of Broch’s or Eliot’s Virgil and, say, a comparison between major English translations from Gavin Douglas and Dryden to today? Dare one even mention how stringently apposite an insight might be won from a contrastive look at the musical apprehension of the Aeneid in Berlioz’s Troyens and in Barraqué’s massive, if incomplete settings of ...”

“... the Lighthouse, the Hogarth Press republished this assessment along with Muir’s pieces on Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley, Eliot and other distinctively modern writers in Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature; they also published his second collection of poetry in 1926, and in May 1927, along with To the Lighthouse, his first novel, The Marionette. This ...”

“... I feel about you. The most powerful and moving poem in Fuller’s anthology is, for this reason, Gavin Ewart’s ‘one-word love poem’, ‘You!’, which focuses on love-object, not poet, and which achieves the difficult feat of making a universal declaration while addressing itself to her eyes only. Ewart’s exclamation mark hints at a widely felt ...”

“... capitals. How far South African business still lags behind a grasp of its crisis is reflected in Gavin Relly’s remark: ‘I don’t think that we have a role to get the government and the ANC together.’ Yet with the resurgence of the most widely-based resistance to Apartheid since 1984, the ANC/UDF coalition has re-emerged almost overnight as the ...”