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“... you can rely on being told that she was displaying ‘qualities that must have once made H.G. Wells wonder what he had gotten into’. There is in this book too much snide misrepresentation and sheer error to report in detail, but most of it pales beside the dottiness of his idea that the Chatterley trial showed ‘literature’s lack of any theoretical ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of ...”

“... that of Lillian Ross, who in 1952 wrote Picture, an arresting, intimate account of the making of John Huston’s movie of The Red Badge of Courage.* But Joseph Mitchell was doing a similar thing; John Hersey used something of the method in writing Hiroshima, as did James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Since we’re ...”

“... work, which stretched and prodded British players and singers (Eric Crozier thought the Sadler’s Wells orchestra, which premiered Peter Grimes in 1945, ‘little more than competent’); the example of his musical performance, as conductor and accompanist; and his work as the impresario of the Aldeburgh Festival. He was the pianist at the premiere of his own ...”

“... of the danger he was running regarding the obscenity laws and obloquy in his own social circles. John Sturrock, whose translation this is, points out in his introduction how the First World War had helped lighten persecution and, in turn, gave breathing space to Proust’s quest, not for lost time, but for revealing human complexity. Proust had very mixed-up ...”

“... the wound is also carried about on a purple velvet cushion, a disembodied slit from which blood wells as Amfortas cries in anguish. But there is no need to insist on Emma Jung’s thesis that the Grail myth is associated with menstrual taboos and mysteries. The point that matters for Parsifal is that its first two acts show a terrible, denaturing rift in ...”

“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”

“... might have let Frankenstein fail, but he would not have written his enterprise off so quickly. Wells’s Moreau creates intelligence, and dies for it, but never shows a flicker of remorse. Underlying this doubt is not a sterile issue of credit and priorities, but a question – an open question – as to whether Science Fiction can be defined ...”

“... like The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886) were received by the public. H.G. Wells’s satirical attack on James in Boon (1915) was another matter, however, and not merely because it came from someone he had hitherto regarded as a friend. This was not engaged criticism, as James saw it, but something more like a gesture of contempt, and ...”

“... Glenway Wescott, who knew him for 30 years, described him to an earlier Sitwell biographer, John Pearson, as a ‘really terrible person’ and ‘psychopathological’. Greene, who has had access to the Sitwell-Tchelitchew correspondence, embargoed when Pearson was writing, has found nothing to contradict this verdict or his own summary of ...”

“... art is by no means uniform. ‘Tear up and burn as much as possible,’ she said to her husband, John Middleton Murry, who, with his own publishing interests at heart and a sensibility that favoured a wife leaving a certain kind of literary legacy behind her, did nothing of the kind: so her output can sometimes look sketchy or inconsequential, sometimes ...”

“... promises of the New Testament – ‘If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will give it’ (John 14) – seemed not to be a promise. Faith might move mountains, but in an invisible mountain range. And I noticed that when people were speaking in tongues, instead of producing a nonsense version of English, they seemed to produce a tourist’s imitation of ...”

“... to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon times the Christian Church in England had stood out against the worship of wells and rivers. The pagan divinities of grove, stream and mountain had been expelled, leaving behind them a disenchanted world to be shaped, moulded and dominated.’ Although Thomas is right to point out that it is too simple to see this disenchantment as ...”