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“... he mused later, ‘I might just as well have cut everything out.’ But he was never caught, as Lawrence was to be, in the trap of a readership that supposed sex to be his special thing. Openness about it was so happily equivocal with him that it became a kind of privacy: ‘shy and unseen’ indeed, but shedding a great glow of animation on everything the ...”

“... Never trust the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an interviewer once asked Larkin ...”

“... youthful, after all.’ But the motif survives that irony. Raine finds it most seriously in Henry James and Matthew Arnold; in James in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Private Life’, Washington Square and other fictions of the unlived life; in Arnold in his poem ‘The Buried Life’: And we have been on many ...”

“... Lawrence on the Revelation which was vouchsafed to the biblical John of Patmos? Those who know both writers can only fear the worst. Woozy metaphysics. Wild history. Blood-stained theology. Vituperation galore. Promises of chaos to come. Even more dismaying glimpses of redemption to follow. Well, one does find something of these in Lawrence’s Apocalypse ...”

“... Lovers (for structural and commercial reasons, it seems, not to eliminate sexy passages – and Lawrence wholly approved). And it is true that he had an instinct for, and endless patience with, those who tend to be regarded as the better sort of novelist. He was the advocate of W.H. Hudson in the early years of the century, and, a generation ...”

“... and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete. Henry James was snooty about Hardy, but I wonder how James would have done, if given as a kind of literary test a cow’s udder to describe? Admirably, no doubt, with his usual lyrical paradox of oddly precise euphemism, but ...”

“... spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was ...”

“... fashion, philanthropy and philandering in ways that could have made him a character in a Henry James novel. More consequentially, Loomis’s mother was a Stimson, of the patrician New York banking and professional family. Loomis was extremely close to his older cousin Henry Stimson, who, after establishing himself as a corporate lawyer to the East Coast ...”

“... guaranteed his implacable exclusion from it. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated comment on Henry James – ‘a mind so fine that no idea can violate it’ – sounds like a crafty backhanded compliment but in fact represents, from the virulently anti-intellectualist Eliot, the sincerest praise. The un-Christian ...”

“... Lawson. Richard Fleming is not the presenter of BBC2’s Review, however; not even in the way that Lawrence Castle, the Prime Minister in the novel, ‘is’ Tony Blair, and President Riley ‘is’ Bill Clinton (the novel’s set in 1999). In Lawson’s imaginings, the President’s priapism extends far beyond Monicagate: Riley has been accused of sexually ...”

“... just what we are groping for today. It is an idea based on the contested conviction that, as James Mill believed, ‘the formation of all human character’ is ‘by circumstances, and so can be ameliorated by education’. But the question arises whether there was any automatic connection between the advance of humanity and its desensualisation. To most ...”

“... half these texts have already been published elsewhere, as the New York University Scrolls scholar Lawrence Schiffman has noted, so the rubric would be defensible only if the Eisenman and Wise interpretation were the first to qualify as ‘complete’. Then there is the question of whether many of these really are ‘key’ texts and whether they have been ...”

“... War, the military campaign, cooked up by the Arab Bureau in Cairo and led in part by T.E. Lawrence, was able to defeat the Ottoman Turks and take Aqaba only by virtue of signals and image intelligence.* Once the enemy’s codes had been cracked, their movements on the ground could be photographed and tracked by seaplanes based on the Red Sea coast and ...”

“... out in Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man that while Hardy arrived in London with nothing, Henry James appeared in the city around the same time clutching a bond for £1000, and letters of introduction.* One of the many virtues of Ford’s account is that it slows down the tempo of these early, difficult years, and draws our attention to uncanonical or even ...”

“... seized by the monument-building urge, they simply wouldn’t exist. Whatever else it may be, Sarah Lawrence is William Van Duzer Lawrence’s tribute to his wife, Sarah; Vassar is Matthew Vassar’s tribute to himself. Smith and Williams, in Massachusetts, sprang up to commemorate their donors. But for sheer iron-willed ...”