“... as Salinger and Brodkey swell inexorably with every book they fail to publish. Conversely, when Thomas Pynchon finally broke his silence to publish Vineland two years ago, there was a strong sense of anticlimax, of a man having performed an act of vandalism on his own reputation: in going to such lengths to focus our attention exclusively on his ...”

“... researchers. The first thing we hear from him is a phatic murmur delivered into a faulty radio: ‘Thomas? Luke? Come in? This is Doc. Hello, hello. Thomas? Luke? Hello?’ After this, he communicates by non-verbal means – ‘making a face, like: what time do you call this, lads?’ We’re given a few snatches of reported ...”

“... with all sides of the argument, the dramatis personae will take trouble with him, and even be frank with him. For those who wish to follow the ramifications of Belgrano-Ponting, the Guardian is the paper, and Norton-Taylor the correspondent. It by no means follows, of course, that a superb journalist will write a successful book. Some have written ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... because of the contradictory manifestations of Modernist effort – how does one reconcile Thomas Mann and Andy Warhol? – he can’t help but see the Modernist instinct as essentially an affirmative urge. Two-thirds of the way through his book, Gay states bluntly that ‘liberalism’ was the ‘fundamental principle of Modernism’. But whose ...”

“... gown, his nice gait on his pantofles, or the affected accent of his speech but they personated,’ Thomas Nashe said of the portrayal of the Cambridge don Gabriel Harvey in Edward Forsett’s comedy Pedantius, which was performed in 1581. The last decade of Foote’s life was shadowed with ill-fortune, or perhaps rather with the ill effects of some spectacular ...”

“... the army. What compels people about The Catcher in the Rye from the very first page is Holden’s frank and original voice as he tells us what he did on a weekend alone in Manhattan after running away from prep school, tormented by the ‘phonys’ and the self-absorbed, like the schoolmate he calls ‘about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat’. The Glass ...”

“... men fell for her and she took her pick. She was famously married: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra. Shaw was the cultivated one. He hated her walking round the house in her bare feet and was shocked to discover she had only ever read one book: Gone with the Wind. ‘I left before he had a chance to flunk me.’ Her three husbands had 20 ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... of the United States of America’ – does he repeat himself? Very well, he repeats himself.As Frank Kermode once said, literary canons ‘negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion’. They make beliefs about what we should know into what we do actually know. That is why they are both necessary and dangerous. They are necessary because you ...”

“... a confidant of almost every name in the SS hierarchy, from Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Ohlendorf, Hans Frank and Eichmann down to less famous monsters such as ‘Gestapo’ Müller, Odilo Globocnik, Theodor Oberländer and Rudolf Höss. He goes grouse-shooting with Albert Speer, is an old friend and drinking comrade of the French collaborationist writer Robert ...”

“... In 1912 Frost moved his family to England and met many writers, including Yeats, Pound and Edward Thomas, who would become his closest friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire ...”

“... She detested coarse language, which Twain had picked up in his knockabout youth. Nor did she like frank language, which was Twain’s stock in trade, and she was equally disturbed, perhaps even frightened, by Twain’s nose for the whiff of hypocrisy. He went for it immediately, much as a Jack Russell terrier would snap at the neck of a mewling kitten. Livy ...”

“... is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is ...”

“... says a voice in Finnegans Wake, managing to lament the issue in something other than English. Thomas Kinsella announces here that ‘there is a sense that it is up to us together to overcome the old dividing idiocies and employ our energies directly, as best we can, on the actual material of the vital inheritance that unites us and divides us.’ The ...”