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“... narrative. Yet if you require a novel to be one entire and perfect chrysolite in the Henry James manner, Durrell is a non-starter. His fiction is made up of wildly different elements which there is no attempt to harmonise. He has ebullient moods and phases, and he wants to get them all in. There are the great descriptive set-pieces, often motivated by ...”

“... is a big movie, no skimpy, fake-ass wannabe shit.’ Lee’s idea of a big movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over the River Kwai. He is also a great admirer of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Later we get a better look at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats with giant ...”

“... what they are and write it all down.’ For Stallabrass, Ofili has failed the cause of Stephen Lawrence because he feeds the ‘largely white and certainly largely privileged gallery-going audience with standard prejudices about blacks, delivered in a manner that is so over-the-top as to be absurd’. These ironies were exultantly lost on the schoolkids I ...”

“... in the Public Works Department, while their sister married two civil servants in succession. John Lawrence, the future viceroy, was one of five brothers working simultaneously in India; John Nicholson, the hero of the siege of Delhi, was one of four brothers who died there. No family, however, sent as many members to India as the Lochs of Drylaw, whose ...”

“... child, regained it to some extent by harassing the Spaniards, and was ruined by the accession of James I, who kept him in the Tower under a suspended death-sentence for 13 years on a trumped-up charge; but some may not know that the alleged offence was treasonable complicity with Spain. When the 13 years had passed, one of Ralegh’s many appeals to ...”

“... memory could explain the choice of Polanski’s Chinatown rather than his Repulsion, of Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia rather than Great Expectations. And there are signs that the selection could have been unduly influenced by what has been promoted on television in the last three or four years. On the other hand, Woody Allen has not been invisible there. By ...”

“... the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free ...”

“... the research which has gone into the preparation of this anthology (the text is inscribed on Sir Lawrence Tanfield’s tomb in Burton Parish Church), and partly because it is so resolutely occasional: Love made me poet, And this I writ; My heart did do it, And not my wit. Lady Tanfield is one of a number of poets included who appear to have been surprised ...”

“... is going to happen this time round. At the end of the day they punish the ordinary person.’ When Lawrence Durrell moved to Cyprus in 1953, his ticket from Trieste to Limassol (he went by boat) cost £47, while the beautiful old house he bought near a monastery in the hills above Kyrenia cost £300. Sixty years later, you can still get a one-way air ticket ...”

“... are (retrogressively) infatuated with the past, don’t square up with 20th-century practice. Lawrence and Joyce held onto their roots even in exile, and there was always MacDiarmid, whose ‘Gairmscoile’ stands the Modernist argument on its head: It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken ...”

“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... he cries. ‘Most 20th-century authors, and in particular the greats like Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence, who regularly feature in A-level and undergraduate syllabuses, inculcate a contempt for ordinary, decent, bread-earning citizens, which must inevitably unsettle youngsters who are on the point of choosing a career.’ Mercifully, the texts are usually ...”

“... her thoughtless parents encumbered her at birth. King has her married to a ‘young man called James Monaco’ and this mistake is symptomatic of a certain vagueness in his approach to the subject, in that he never manages to elucidate all the myths which the lady’s posturings so insistently encouraged. Yet such an attack is indispensable if we are to ...”

“... history and practice of women’s dress was something he took trouble to learn about (this time James Laver was the inspirational figure in the background). Indeed, he went in for some grand theorising about the relation between waists and civilisation. Given the simplicity and, presumably, un-corsetedness of wartime Utility clothing, he got a peculiar ...”

“... He belonged, by natural kinship, in the company of high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over ...”