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“... destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. Janet Malcolm does not suppose that her distress about a fact will stop its being a fact. Neither is she part of the Freud-processing industry, whose ambition is to pop Freud into the blender and dish up something bland. Hers is a legitimate cry of wounded ...”

“... and making a face, she’d offer a defining word after each name:Gloria Steinem – phoneyJanet Malcolm – pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be ...”

“... in which literary events get much attention, but the publication in the New Yorker last August of Janet Malcolm’s study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was an exception. Brilliantly packaged with reprints of the Plath poems which the New Yorker had originally published, the issue was a sell-out on both sides of the Atlantic, and for weeks no dinner ...”

“... the Washington Post and the paper’s worst moment, in September 1980, when they ran a report by Janet Cooke that had everyone talking. Cooke wrote a thrilling story about an eight-year-old boy from a low-income neighbourhood of Washington who was addicted to heroin, a story for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. But the New Journalistic ethos was overstrained ...”

“... read The Journalist and the Murderer. It is not a well-intentioned question. It implies that Ms Malcolm’s book has dealt irreparable damage to me and my kind (journalists who do interviews for a living), and that henceforward we must hang our heads in shame. I don’t see it myself, but let’s begin with the book. It is an account of the ethical issues ...”

“... spin their dirty straw into gold. Writing about the Sylvia Plath industry in The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm compared the biographer at work to ‘the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewellery and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away’. The scholarly ...”

“... relationship with the rest of the world – or, as they sometimes call it, ‘the goyim’. Janet Malcolm’s two very striking books of reportage, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives, make this clear. Freud’s wife, according to her grandson, ‘divided the world into those who knew of grandfather and those who did ...”

“... nervous systems as their marriage disintegrates; the sides taken by their literary friends (Janet Malcolm phones Bloom on Roth’s behalf, asking her to move out of the couple’s Manhattan apartment into a hotel: Bloom flies to Rome and takes dubious solace in the company of Gore Vidal). Then there are the fascinating financial ...”

“... not to mention life – behind her. But also it is just pragmatic. She has no patience with Janet Malcolm and her pronouncement about every journalist knowing that what ‘he’ does is ‘morally indefensible’. If Malcolm really believes this, why is she writing a book about it? Do even the grandest dames ...”

“... raised by the prospect of being let into the private lives of others? On the one hand, we have Janet Malcolm famously describing the biographer as a burglar at the subject’s keyhole, shamelessly marketing voyeuristic delights. On the other hand, it is often asserted that nothing is more boring than hearing the narrative of other people’s ...”

“... on the grounds that that is what mental conflict feels like. In his monumental Freud Evaluated, Malcolm Macmillan refers to ‘the psychoanalytic tradition of directly translating subjective impressions into economic terms’. Even Richard Wollheim, who rarely rises above an abject appreciativeness in his dealings with Freud, concedes that Freud ...”

“... lives, attitudes and relationships in order to understand why they rejected Shakespeare, much as Janet Malcolm, in The Silent Woman (1994), turned the tables on biographers of Sylvia Plath by intruding on their domestic lives. According to Shapiro, mainstream Shakespeare scholars have collectively ignored the authorship controversy because it is their ...”

“... readers gulp. None of the new poems is sugared with affection; Hughes renders very precisely what Janet Malcolm has called Plath’s ‘not-niceness’. In the opening poem, ‘Fulbright Scholars’, Hughes remembers disinterestedly surveying Plath’s photograph, her grin false ‘for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners’. A set of ...”

“... knew what they would think about it before they got there. In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm talks about betrayal as one of the besetting problems of journalism: betrayal by the journalist of his ‘source’, because the ‘source’ always assumes, or at least hopes, that his testimony will be treated as a unique document when it ...”

“... a supposedly authoritative production sponsored by a world-class museum they are shockingly poor. Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice is a short yet absorbing book about how another female couple, the rather more renowned Stein and Toklas, likewise survived the Nazi Occupation – in this case, in eastern France. After a disagreeable bolus of ...”