“... claims he has filled ‘the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full view of the public: Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never, never conceded to us goys. In concluding, I might mention an unnsual solution to the problem. This was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an American story of a ...”

“... and so he slips away from Prague in time. J.P. Stern imagines him fighting with the Partisans; Philip Roth finds him a poor teacher of Hebrew in Newark, New Jersey. Whatever his future when he leaves Prague, he becomes what he has always been, a refugee. Maybe (for there is no harm in dreams) he even lives long enough to find himself the great man he ...”

“... of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ...”

“... revolution and its social tremors, unlike the exploding confetti and frantic wrist action of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (all three published in one wigging-out year).Couples was sexually explicit but morally serious, psychologically astute and starkly pore-examining, a John Cassavetes ensemble ...”

“... do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John ...”

“... had become friends with many writers, especially Mordecai Richler; now Moore became friends with Philip Roth and Neil Simon. They divided their time between Manhattan and Long Island. Moore won prizes, sold movie rights and began to achieve a sort of fame, but he lived in those years in a world he grew to distrust: ‘I lived in Greenwich Village ...”

“... bordering on ‘minstrelsy’, contrasted sharply with the work of Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who had ‘not shown a great interest in the shadow of the Shoah’.A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel. More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the ...”

“... of the wave of Eastern European Jews who fled the pogroms in the early 20th century. America, as Philip Roth wrote of his ancestors, was their Zion, not Palestine. They revered FDR and despised Joe McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, Trump’s future mentor. They were grateful for America, but their gratitude was tinged with anxiety. My paternal ...”

“... tall, the world’s smallest mobile adult human) lacks access to personal transportation. Cadence Roth, known as Cady, is a dwarf whose show-business aspirations were both fulfilled and strangled at birth, ten years before the action of the book, by a starring but paradoxical role in a classic film for children of all ages, Mr Woods. She played an elf who ...”

“... hear its beating, thum-thump-thum-thump’.At Yaddo writers’ retreat, Frame at first avoided Philip Roth. Once they became friends, they took to writing each other provocative notes. (‘Dear Mrs Breast, It has come to my attention that you have not only failed to pay your rent on the nest we have provided for you, but that you sit down there all ...”

“... and deadly serious purposes. The narrator has parallels with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy (both inheritors of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man). The accident on the set of the war movie alludes to Invisible Man, and the arrogant, racist Auteur takes the place of the white man who lands Ellison’s narrator in ...”

“... was certain his appendix was about to collapse.’Many illustrious friends and acquaintances – Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – make cameos in Brennan’s biography, but there is little sense of the texture of these relationships. Of Said’s personal life, we learn even less. After his second marriage in 1970, other women ...”

“... San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely ...”