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“... Older, wealthier Alexandrians sometimes talk about their poorer neighbours with disdain, much as Lawrence Durrell once spoke of Egyptian Arabs. Alexandria was the scene of two traumatic events during the run-up to the uprising against Mubarak: the police killing in June 2010 of a young man called Khaled Said, now an icon of the revolutionary ...”

“... of the English poetic career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on ...”

“... stock heritage prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and ...”

“... I didn’t like them.’ And Bair doubts that an evening spent arguing the literary toss with Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller in fact ended with both men saying: ‘We have a real woman artist before us, the first one and we ought to bow down instead of trying to make a monster out of her.’ These are lies that ‘improve the reality’ and ...”

“... have? Even Freud was able to get this much maths right in his famous remark to Fliess (cited by Lawrence Durrell at the start of The Alexandria Quartet and also here by Garber): ‘You are certainly right about bisexuality. I am also getting used to regarding every sexual act as one between four individuals.’ (Garber presents a lively history of the ...”

“... the piano pieces of the Catalan composer Federico Mompou. On another occasion he recounted meeting Lawrence Durrell, a hero of his younger days, in Paris, and not being at all let down. Middleton’s enthusiasms were more wide-ranging than those of anyone I’ve known, and wholly unpredictable, although kitsch or sport never came up, or literary ...”

“... massed tents of protesting trade unionists alarmed by threats of cuts and redundancies. Through Lawrence Durrell, Miller meets – and loathes – members of the British expat community, effete classicists and cultural carpetbaggers whose practised ironies he fails to appreciate. He also encounters, and embraces, Greek poets of the ...”

“... but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as ...”

“... with a hatred of poetry and a contempt for beauty; it is in the British in particular that D.H. Lawrence judges it to intensify the innate philistinism of mankind in general. So what follows hard upon the end of hostilities is ‘the British Literary Diaspora’. Norman Douglas is in Capri and Basil Bunting in Tenerife and Julian Bell at Wuhan ...”

“... voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the ...”

“... and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1930s could throw himself into editing and publishing, as Edgell Rickword did at Left Review and Lawrence & Wishart, yet still consider poetry the core of his commitment. By 1945 this was becoming harder. The poet Randall Swingler, also a Communist, soon came to grief after returning from the war: the BBC shunted him into obscurity because of his ...”

“... yelling, the hooting, the screeching brakes, the clanging of tram-cars and howl of tram-horns’. Lawrence Durrell, who had been living in Greece until the Germans invaded, found Cairo (‘this corrupt and slow Nile’) not merely physically disgusting, but morally too: ‘Cripples, deformities, opthalmia, goitre, amputations, lice, flies. In the streets ...”