This had begun in heterodox meditations on Christianity, and had then swerved towards mysticism, Buddhism and – most arousing of all – earthy, pagan theologies. In addition to the attractions of his literary genius, there was the thrill of Lawrence's personal philosophy.

As the novelist and critic Howard Jacobson has written, ' Women in Love is the nearest any English novel has so far approximated to the fearful grandeur of Medea or the Oresteia.' By the 60s, we didn't need to box him into a pigeonhole: he was protean, inspiring, and with the kind of grandeur that is unknown today. As he once wrote to Aldous Huxley: 'I always say, my motto is 'Art for my sake'.' This Lawrence was also the magnificent standard-bearer for English modernism. Anyway, don't we expect our greatest writers to be a little bit mad? As compelling as the fantasy of the creative crucible, we had the puritanical cold steel of FR Leavis to remind us, in The Great Tradition, about Lawrence's artistic integrity and moral grandeur, his profound artistic seriousness. It's an undifferentiated blur now, but if I stop to focus on my DH Lawrence, the Lawrence of the 60s, I can begin to discern the fuzzy but recognisable outline of a literary aesthetic that was both persuasive and, for Lawrence at least, coherent. Adolescents had worn khaki in the 1940s, and flannel in the 50s, but we would dress like clowns. We would celebrate Dionysus, and we would be free. We would, as Lawrence put it, 'break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to form our utterance'. We, by contrast, would feel the blood thunder in our veins, become spontaneous and vital and instinctual. For readers who had grown up with JM Barrie, CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E Nesbit and all the repressed masters of post-Victorian children's literature, Lawrence seemed to offer the most exhilarating liberation.

1913 dh lawrence novel