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“... of assuming an audience ‘both universal and homogeneous’. The pamphlet was quoted recently by John Gross in an afterword to a new edition of his book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.* Gross assumed a combative stance, calling his piece ‘the man of letters in a closed shop’, and speaking of the ‘cold horror’ that filled him when he ...”

“... she wouldn’t be at all disturbed or shocked. The fundamental part of his appeal, as the critic John Barber observed, ‘was both to mirror and to indulge the middle-class fear of sex’. Rattigan’s own father – their relations form another subtext in most of the plays – was a famous roué who had been eased out of the Foreign Office for ...”

“... floated their dreamlands far down the Danube and into the ‘bloodthirsty’ Balkans. Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias. Literary ‘othering’, as teachers tell their classes, is a way of confirming your own ...”

“... these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, but he sees radical possibilities in the ‘transgressive reinscription’ of such writers as Wilde, Genet or Orton, who undermine dominant structures of gender and class even as they appropriate and mimic them. Although he makes ...”

“... which in its turn provokes the repudiation and alienation found, characteristically, in D.H. Lawrence’s autobiographical sketch: ‘One can belong absolutely to no class.’ All classes are prisons. But it may give cachet to have belonged to one, to the working class especially, as it does to have been at a war, or in a real prison. It is commonplace ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... in Louisiana, whom they haven’t even contacted. Such fictional niceties did not trouble D.H. Lawrence, who in a passionate essay of 1923 insisted that the Leatherstocking series (the five novels that feature Natty Bumppo) were the first vital embodiment of the new consciousness underpinning American culture. In Natty, ...”

“... Emperor Rudolph II, who sat in his high palace in Prague communing with the stars and tried to get John Dee to put him in touch with the heavenly orders. True, there had been Pope Paul III, a politician if ever there was one and founder of the Counter-Reformation: he retained an astrologer to tell him, I suppose, when it was prudent to launch the Society of ...”

“... Month, he writes: ‘Its tone and voice are as individual and recognisable as that of, say, D.H. Lawrence, and, it might be argued, as wise and valuable in thought, though richer in entertainment.’ This strikes me as nonsense. Here is the voice of that novel (and such stuff can be found all over at least the first half of his oeuvre): The precipitous ...”

“... circumstances even impressive, the mere desire to have seems to many today – just as it did to John Locke – a furtive, even incipiently criminal form of lust. Disputes over property, and over the power which flows from it and flows back into it, are far from being the only major theme (let alone the motor) of human history. But for a number of millennia ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights ...”

“... a Cafetière as sister to the immured (but undefeated) heroines of Beckett’s late monologues. John Elderfield, curator of the Portraits show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was ...”

“... of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”

“... the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by means of epic ...”