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“... an adolescent daughter who treats him with undisguised contempt, persuades Owen to set off to sail single-handed round the world in a gimcrack boat built for weekend jaunts. Some Emersonian strain is obviously intended here, some evocation of the venerable American cultural myth of continuous exploration, a sense of the archetypal American as an ...”

“... reader back to her body in a way no other literary strategy quite does. The voices of Ronell and Lawrence Rickels are the driest in Lust for Life: Ronell’s because she articulates her grief over a friend’s loss in etiolated academic language interspersed with lachrymose, though sincere, intertitles; Rickels’s because, as a psychoanalyst, he is the sole ...”

“... of the aged Freya Stark proceeding down the Euphrates on a raft, and pieces about his learning to sail, and then doing so – down the Mississippi, round the British Isles, as more fully reported elsewhere. The book as a whole is as deftly constructed as Pritchett could wish: the splices are expert, and there are only a few repetitions. Raban is interesting ...”

“... lesser artists submit.’ Painting set free. That phrase, the subtitle of this exhibition, was Lawrence Gowing’s, who about fifty years ago came up with the claim that Turner was the first modern artist, perhaps the first abstract expressionist. His view of Turner was based on the recovery of works left rolled up in his studio when he died, kept in ...”

“... the hope that Saddam would retaliate, which Mann thought would trigger UN action; the other was to sail a cargo ship carrying nuclear weapons-grade fuel or bomb parts into Basra, thus appearing to confirm US suspicions that Iraq had WMDs. Apparently, Blair liked parts of the scheme, but Mossad was dismissive. Later, questioned about the problems the Iraq ...”

“... in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in William Lawrence, the surgeon who took on the Vitalists; in Vincent Lunardi, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, John Jeffries, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the ...”

“... Royds noted that his captain on the Discovery voyage was ‘continually on the panic’. Captain Lawrence Oates wrote to his mother from the Terra Nova journey that he disliked Scott intensely and that ‘the fact of the matter is he is not straight, it is himself first and when he has got all he can out of you it is shift for yourself.’ Apsley ...”

“... his introduction wrote of The Golden Bough as a ‘voyage’ – the author as helmsman, setting sail with ‘the wind in our shrouds’. What kind of travel was Frazer suggesting? Not certainly the once daring, now commonplace travel around the Mediterranean. After all, in the first chapter of the book, it was the coast of Italy that was conjured up as the ...”

“... equipped with modem-ports and work stations, which would enable the nation’s champions to sail back and forth without being fouled by the lesser movements of their fellow citizens. Though it sounded implausible at the time, Archer’s proposal was in line with the more baroque – perhaps pre-Cameronian – tradition of Tory thinking about public ...”

“... 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 it was ...”

“... curiosity whose work has not worn well. ‘I think one ought to be downright cruel to him,’ D.H. Lawrence said, and many have been. Max Beerbohm was, when at a dinner party he asked Davies, ‘How long is it since Shaw discovered you?’; on being told it was 13 or 14 years, he replied, ‘Oh dear dear – and has it been going on all this time?’ and added ...”

“... ymployment of numbers of idle men’. Money was raised for a fleet of seven ships, which set sail from Plymouth in April 1585 under Richard Grenville. Ralegh himself was forbidden to leave the queen’s side. This colonial adventure turned out to be a fairly typical Elizabethan mess, in which unrealistic hopes met bad weather, piracy, practical failure ...”

“... of Cavafy’s work into English and made it known to such figures as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Here is Forster’s description of Cavafy: a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly . . . Yes, it is Mr Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the ...”

“... because they simply cannot go on. We are now entering a period of rapid transition’ (Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, 2008). ‘We depend just as much on our gas-guzzling, chilled plug-in, “just-in-time” food deliveries as ancient Romans did on foreign conquests, shipping and slaves – and our food system is no more secure, ethical or ...”

“... cranes into an alien place – The god’s spume foaming in the prince’s hair – Where do you sail? If Helen were not there What would Troy matter, men of Achaean race? The sea, and Homer – it’s love that moves all things. To whom should I listen? Homer falls silent now And the black sea surges toward my pillow Like a loud declaimer, heavily ...”