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“... also more impassioned. They know what it is like, and they know what they want. It is Henry James, of course, who exhibits at the highest level the combination of the practising novelist’s experience and the finest critical intelligence, but lesser if still considerable writers, such as E.M. Forster (whose Aspects of the Novel has proved so strangely ...”

“... those who loom large in this pantheon are Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Dewey, Cavell, James, Davidson and Derrida. At its best, Rorty’s writing has energy, humour, great tolerance, an exemplary clarity that can illuminate even the darker reaches of Heidegger, and above all a rare ability to communicate enthusiasm and sheer love of ideas. At its ...”

“... Walter Benjamin was not a letter writer of the order of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity ...”

“... by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and Vidals feel most relaxed: a milieu in which their kingship is acknowledged, in which ...”

“... Alfred the Great (who earns the mysterious plaudit that ‘there was something about him of T.E. Lawrence’) gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in ...”

“... new achievement is said to have entered English letters, going from Blake through Dickens to D.H. Lawrence, and centring in the novel. The admission of Dickens into the canon overturns the verdict of Fiction and the Reading Public and goes beyond the rescue of Hard Times, the one Dickens novel treated in The Great Tradition (1948). That Dickens was a popular ...”

“... confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish mood, asked ‘What would you say, Sir, if you were told that in a hundred ...”

“... aberration was F.R. Leavis, who behaved as if creativity had passed out of the world with D.H. Lawrence and could only be brought back by the grace and favour of his own writings. A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of ...”

“... literary criticism scattered about in his own books, some of which may be quoted. For instance, on James Joyce in The Dog at Clambercrown, which opens with Brooke reading Ulysses in the plane on the way to a holiday in Sicily: Ulysses, I suppose, is the most fascinating and the most devastatingly boring novel ever written ... I remember, many years ago (at ...”

“... handed the oversight of the continuing life of the dictionary to a third Oxford-based historian, Lawrence Goldman. An incidental but peculiarly fitting consequence of Matthew’s early death was that he qualified for inclusion himself, an entry done quite beautifully by his friend and colleague, Ross McKibbin. So what are the criteria for inclusion, aside ...”

“... but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has always got her nose in Henry James or D.H. Lawrence, becomes as fastidious about books as Hartnell, Mattli and Stiebel had taught her to be about tailoring, and moans if she finds herself on holiday with nothing to read. Her own writing is more in the ...”

“... in the South Atlantic. In his memoir Shadows on the Grass,* embellished by a fine cover from Lawrence Toynbee which does summery justice to its cricketing occasions, Raven revisits, not for the first time, the scenes of his youthful disgraces: expelled from Charterhouse for the ‘usual thing’, eased out of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry for ...”

“... along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs from, say, Bly’s in that ...”

“... that he had no interest in modern art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation ...”

“... and accepted it in a much less philosophical spirit. One of the paradoxes of emancipation, as D.H. Lawrence perceived, was that the bright new world did not include sex, except in bogus romantic form. But Daff was gay and witty, with the Pekinese flower face for which the cloche hat was designed (see Shepard’s illustration to ‘...”