“... as people’. On the other hand, one could cite Nabokov’s afterword to the novel: ‘despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow.’ Equally external, this, but less positively identikit than Nabokov’s other opinions of these characters. I prefer Nabokov’s aesthetic as it emerges from a discussion of Gogol’s The Overcoat: ‘the ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... this e-meter allows auditors to ‘see a thought’. I don’t want​ to be ‘audited’ by John Travolta, or any other policeman of the soul. And as I shuffle towards the immigration desk after the plane has landed, I don’t feel grateful for the final act of examination that awaits me, with all its sophisticated accoutrements of ‘social ...”

“... was the rustle of the Holy Ghost, hers an oracular hooga-booga. The objections that Howe, Rahv, John Simon, the art critic Hilton Kramer and other keepers of the scrolls lodged against her were as much about the 1960s as they were about her, for no one in the Family (as Norman Podhoretz, a former Partisan Review-er, dubbed them) personified the 1960s more ...”