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“... that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is recorded to have read is Lady Chatterley, from which, like the unlearned readers who had heard that his Manilius contained a scurrilous preface, he doubtless hoped to extract a low enjoyment. Mr Graves is artlessly surprised at his having read ...”

“... appeal. Where Sampson wants to make the ‘revolution as bloodless and manageable as possible’, John Saul is primarily concerned with its socialist outcome.* His account deals with familiar instances of repression and resistance, which he tends to romanticise as only foreign sympathisers can. It smacks of condescension when a tenured Toronto academic ...”

“... his own valuation. His successes came by appealing over their heads. Literary people like T.E. Lawrence and, later, his brother; Shaw (despite the differences over his portrait); and Cyril Connolly were more likely than sculptors or painters to be Epstein’s advocates. His commercial success depended on a few patrons, above all ...”

“... qualities were most severely tested when she went to South Africa to visit her aunt and met John Ponsonby, who was working for her uncle, the high commissioner. Ponsonby had been born with a cleft palate and harelip, which he covered up with a bushy moustache, but to Constance, he was simply ‘adorable’. The trouble was that he had no money, and ...”

“... On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned’. Although oral ...”

“... legitimate and illegitimate, whose opportunities and expectations they were attempting to manage. John Tailyour, another Scot, moved to Jamaica in 1783, having been encouraged to consider the opportunities there by his extremely wealthy and successful cousin Simon Taylor. Taylor, according to Lady Nugent, the governor’s wife, ‘had a numerous family, some ...”

“... they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for torture (when John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant and Protestant, was incinerated after torture in 1531, More – by then lord chancellor – imagined ‘a hot firebrand burning at his back, that all the water of the world will never be able to quench’), one recent ...”

“... the numbers involved, a rank shift had occurred in certain hearts and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine ...”

“... of Croydon as a Motif in English Literature’, and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his ...”

“... not grapple, as we might have expected, with the literary competition – with Dickens, Eliot or Lawrence – but rather with the alleged critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted ...”

“... of Louis XIV’s Paris made endless risible plans for the ‘French’ community in the St Lawrence estuary. But it is unlikely that any or all of this would have worked without an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry ...”

“... Their shared liking for new writing did much to lighten the gloom. Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence became valued friends. There were many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their ...”

“... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... of energy and his paranoia – Campbell resembled two other, more important contemporaries, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. And like them at their least controlled, he demonstrated in his life and work two basic points: that energy alone, taken as a human value, leads to something very like fascism; and that paranoia is fatal to even the most gifted artist ...”

“... them in the Forties. Though she would one day teach writing at Columbia, Syracuse and Sarah Lawrence, she had little formal education. In the mid-Fifties Paley became a political activist of more than ordinary idealism and commitment, rare for any American writer: she helped organise one of the first abortion ‘speak-outs’ in the United States, in ...”