“... of the book, reflecting the satisfaction of an author who believes he has steered the Queen Mary into port. And why wouldn’t he have felt all pink and pleased? At nine hundred pages, Philip Roth: The Biography delivers the surplus goods, as if subscribing to the notion that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Each paragraph is as firmly packed as ...”

“... with the dying, he began to collect remains, and had those of his grandparents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, transported from St Pancras Old Church in London to the cemetery of St Mary’s in Bournemouth, where they lie today with his mother, Mary.After a number of ‘thundering ...”

“... on my right forearm. On my right bicep I got a Chinese skull, with a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I ...”

“... off for not being ‘more vigorous on human rights in Kashmir’. He needn’t have bothered. A beard rose to ask why the US Government had betrayed them. The repetition irritated the Congressman. He took the offensive, complaining about this being an all-male meeting. Why were these men’s wives and daughters not present? The bearded faces remained ...”

“... one of the bends, I fell. I landed on a body: it was an Arab man, lying on his side, long hair and beard, and he was gone. By the time I got to the third floor I couldn’t feel my arms. I’d breathed in a lot of carbon monoxide – I was being poisoned and I fell. That’s when the firefighters came and picked me up.’‘The fire was all the way round the ...”