“... 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 ...”

“... a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice versa. For the first sixty or so pages it is possible to read Arabesques as an intelligently contemporary ...”

“... that set off the tingle of association. The dialogue​ with the gravedigger in Philip Roth’s Everyman is one of the finest things in his late work, a scene of stoic eloquence, with the gravedigger (black, over fifty, with a precise style of speech like a Southerner’s) explaining in detail what he does: I don’t use a machine ...”

“... closer to the outlines of Theroux’s history. Neither book is imaginable without the precedent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981) – in which Zuckerman’s succès de scandale Carnovsky stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which ...”

“... which Cohen-Solal finds ‘a more opaque and less ethnically identifiable patronymic than “Roth”, the one picked by his brothers’. The name also seems a clever piece of personal branding, like Texaco. Rothko moved, during the early 1940s, from realism to recognisable mythical subjects drawn from Greek and Christian iconography. By 1944, he had ...”

“... recently to name a book that made her laugh, Ferrante went with Portnoy’s Complaint, and like Philip Roth’s her novels are concerned, in a way that’s clever and distanced but also consciously intense, with giving voice to parts of the self that not everyone puts on display. There are other similarities: a provincial city – Naples, Newark ...”

“... that, in his own small way, he would have given it a hard time. I am not sure what his reaction to Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist would have been. He would doubtless have admired the dedication of Roth’s ‘pure’ Communist, O’Day, but it is to Ira Ringold that my father would have instinctively warmed ...”

“... of privilege.’ We have heard this credo from Cisneros, and we hear it, via McGurl, from Philip Roth:It ‘did not dawn on’ [Roth] that the ‘anecdotes and observations’ of his boyhood in lower-middle-class Newark with which he entertained his highbrow friends ‘might be made into ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”