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“... Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad ...”

“... This isn’t new: there was a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could ...”

“... student and then student-teacher in Brussels with Emily, she returned to Belgium, alone, to teach English. She knew how ill-suited she was to both the careers open to her: the former badly paid, exhausting and requiring an authority she felt she lacked; the latter time-consuming, open to abuse, isolating and necessitating an affection for children of which ...”

“... One of them had been in the Bicycle Corps, which made us laugh because it was all so Edwardian and English and pathetic. ‘He died heroically – his bicycle shot out from under him.’ Housman could have written a poem about it.Uncle Newton, it turned out, was not far off, halfway between Amiens and Albert, in a pretty little walled ‘extension’ cemetery ...”

“... 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further 172 added to this, the first English edition, amounting to a total of 2503. The evolving, unfinished nature of the project of memorialisation is evident in the ordering of its visual artefacts: the strictly alphabetical arrangement of the first series ends on page 1414, with Elisa ...”

“... communism rather than hierarchy, a possibility glimpsed, or anyway named, in the literary theorist Richard Dienst’s recent The Bonds of Debt, which at one point rather vaguely imagines a future ‘radical politics of indebtedness’ fulfilling the slogans of classical Marxism.*) But regular monetised exchanges – completed or incomplete – are a relative ...”

“... to have a long conversation with someone who feels the same way? If so, you will enjoy the latest English translation of a book by Roudinesco, the author of Lacan & Co, Why Psychoanalysis? and, most recently, La Part obscure de nous-mêmes (not yet translated). If not, you might enjoy parts of the book anyway. Roudinesco has a novelist’s talent for ...”

“... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...”

“... first oil well by Elmer Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 – all of them, we might note, English-speaking businessmen. The three significant fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – were all at one stage (mostly) carbohydrates, living matter fossilised during a relatively short time, if we can call ninety million years a short time, some two ...”

“... essay ‘The Home Office and its Sources of Information and Investigation 1791-1801’, in the English Historical Review for 1979; and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin in her study The Anti-Jacobins 1798-1800 (1988). At the very end of 1788 George III was still apparently mad, and the Prince of Wales was desperately hoping for an Act of Parliament that would ...”

“... in Britain alone. ‘Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves,’ an anonymous English doctor wrote:We had a habit of looking on them with a fatal indifference, indeed, inasmuch as it led us to believe that they could be effectually subdued. But the cholera was something outlandish, unknown, monstrous; its tremendous ravages, so long ...”

“... decades. She cleaned for him and cooked for him and spoke her native Rusyn with him and used funny English with his friends. Over the 1950s Warhol’s earnings gradually increased. His tax form for 1959 declared an income of $53,000, ‘more than almost anyone around him earned’. In 1960 he could afford to spend $60,000 on a four-storey house at Lexington ...”

“... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...”

“... London’s temples of public art. ‘Irish, Welsh, Iraqi, Bengali … three Bengalis. And myself, English,’ Quinn said. It’s the sort of diversity that might have pleased Bevan. But the government wants Quinn out.In the 1990s, Quinn was officially recognised as too sick to work as the result of a bundle of ailments (she lists them: joint ...”

“... the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.The ...”