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“... fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or Romantic than realist. They ...”

“... as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to redraw the cultural map. The Victorians were moribund, their prosody stalled at the level of Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’, a paean ...”

“... with the urge to boil infants alive. If Marx believes with an off-the-wall libertarian like D.H. Lawrence that all our powers should be realised just because they are ours, then he is guilty of a naive naturalism; but if he does not hold such a disreputable view, then he has to name some criteria by which we select suitable candidates for self-realisation ...”

“... it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human atmosphere. And it ...”

“... that Pirandello – more than Giovanni Verga, the verista novelist admired and translated by D.H. Lawrence (and discussed here by James Wood on 10 August) – is the key to Sicily, where people like to explain, over the most concentrated espresso drunk anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident ...”

“... and expect you to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no ...”

“... we do a double-take. Occasionally, there is a flash of recognition. ‘It seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy ...”

“... problem. Nearly twenty years ago, just before the tide of historical fashion turned against him, Lawrence Stone wrote a supremely confident short book called The Causes of the English Revolution. It argued, in up-to-date sociological jargon, more or less everything against which Russell’s writing has been a reaction. The bold innocence of Russell’s ...”

“... with the cultural nationalism of the country in which he grew up. He got to know Henry James, read Proust, studied Bergson and took an interest in pre-Christian religious practices, a subject on which his sources were more up to date than T.S. Eliot’s. In the 1890s his stories appeared in the Bodley Head quarterly The Yellow Book and Virginia ...”

“... the Department of English at Princeton, traces the Western’s obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on ...”

“... Jacobson seems to have got out of his depth. He – or rather Barney – drops the odd allusion to Lawrence and D.M. Thomas, and the book seems to be trying to become a critique, not just of rural fiction, but of the English novel about sex. But it doesn’t manage it, and peters out. All the same, Jacobson certainly isn’t a novelist to be dismissed. His ...”

“... taken a Manhattan avant-gardist brought up as a scion of the Bank of Tokyo and educated at Sarah Lawrence to cut through this bedraggled but corrupt crew. But what Ono seems to have told Lennon is only another version of the sort of advice Arthur Ballard seems to have already given him. Ono insisted that he was an artist and ought to be proud of it, that his ...”

“... to lack literary qualities of Carswell’s kind – she was the friend and admirer of D.H. Lawrence – but McIntyre could have availed himself of detailed new historical work on high and low culture in this period: on the ballad and folksong revival, for instance, on the lingering legacy of Jacobitism and on the emergence of Celtic nationalism. For ...”

“... Until recently, the art of modern biography was too little influenced by the man who invented it, James Boswell, and, even today, many of those who set out to write the lives of authors seem to be led by a suspicion that everything of interest about the subject might already have been said by the subject himself. The literary biographer is haunted by Nabokov’s stylishly defensive comment that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of his style ...”

“... horrific realities of everyday life in a Nazi-conquered Britain (this found form as a novella, I, James Blunt). And in the summer of 1940 he wrote an article for Country Life entitled ‘The New “Merry England”’, in which he describes the invigorating camaraderie of Binsted, his home village, where he was the commander of the Local Defence ...”