Lawrence's descriptive powers are at their finest in Part II. How well he captures the atmosphere of a German garrison town, sees into the gemiltlich German soul which has ruined itself with dreams of order, then takes off into the mountains and forests and flinty kind-cold streams, recording everything - which was his unique gift - as though recovering from an illness and seeing the natural world as for the first time. Johanna, whom we get to know physically as well s any heroine in literature, is adorable but maddening. The intimacy between the bizarrely ill-assorted two is presented candidly but without lubricity. When Lawrence sails off into his harangues to the reader about sex mysticism he knows in time when to tack to our patience. He is never without humour or irony...

It would have been pleasant to have picked up this book as a plain text, in the 'brave red' of the old collected edition, but we have to have it as an item in the emerging scholarly Cambridge edition of the works, with notes telling us whatfleur du mal means, Goethe's dates, how many pence in the shilling of the ancient discredited coinage, maps, historical identifications of the fictional characters, every fifth line numbered to refer us to the notes. In other words, we are meeting a fine piece of Laurentiana with an earnest chaperone. 'One of these days, dear reader, you may meet this book with an apparatus criticus clanking behind it.' Lawrence's cheek didn't take him so far. But it took him as far as chiding the critics in the Observer and Times who had taken him to task for his lowness in the Part I which he had already seen reviewed.He didn't give a damn, really. Books, he says in Part II, are leaves on the tree of life, to be blown away and forgotten.