“... shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I ...”

“... of prejudice and convention, or the merely fashionable attraction of the Left for figures like Norman Podhoretz, who turns out to be really interested simply in Making It) they are coming to the same conclusion from very different angles. Brightman, I think, is tacitly accusing her subject of being obsessed, a trifle perversely, with the personal. McCarthy ...”

“... on these government fixed price contracts ... However, I recognise the Gaddis attitude on page 20, when a man is copying down some meaningless arrangement of Greek letters hewn upon a school portico. ‘Oh, can you read it?’ asks an admirer. ‘Not exactly read it,’ says the snob, ‘but I thought I’d copy it down, it might make a good epigraph ...”

“... from Huntington’s, was soon after committed to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman, Oklahoma; this was when young Woody started a-wandering. And then, in February 1947, Cathy, Guthrie’s daughter with his second wife, Marjorie Mazia, burned to death in a house fire caused by faulty wiring in a radio. The child was only four years ...”

“... Reich and act accordingly!”’ He had captured the imagination of the ‘counterculture’. Norman Mailer, who dismissed psychoanalysts as ‘ball shrinkers’, promoted him in the Village Voice (‘intellectuals,’ he told Turner, ‘never had good orgasms’). For Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs he was the only analyst worth taking seriously ...”

“... on ships. This chapter supersedes all other discussions of the subject in English, and Ray Page, on letters runic and poetic, offers a remarkable example of how an expert can demonstrate the general interest of a very technical topic without sacrifice of scholarly integrity. The Northern World hardly succeeds in its professed purpose, ‘to examine the ...”

“... There are commendably few factual errors, and the sole really glaring one is an editorial slip on page 151, where the photograph captioned ‘Germaine Greer, 1965’ is of a happily unfamous girl called Sheilah Buhr. I was ASM for the touring company of that year’s May Week revue (its title, My Girl Herbert, was, alas, my suggestion) and can remember ...”

“... exoneration or canonisation, but to live – with all the messiness that implied – on the page. What if she didn’t experience her own life as that of the concrete block feminist heroine I wanted her to be? And if I really hadn’t grown out of wanting to learn a lesson from her life, might the real lesson be the harder one – to value her life for ...”

“... Camouflage, ships painted in the disruptive ‘dazzle’ schemes developed by the British artist Norman Wilkinson were said to resemble ‘Cubist paintings on a colossal scale’. Yet the First World War was not merely history’s way of confirming Picasso’s genius, and the emergence of strategic camouflage didn’t represent a simple triumph of ...”

“... Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a ...”

“... This evangelical Americanism was assisted not only by the ‘militant Christian’ belief, as Norman Mailer described it, that America is ‘the only force for good that can rectify the bad’. America’s presumed leadership of the free world also bred an atmosphere of solemn conformity among many of its expensively educated middle-class and ...”

“... Appendix Eight, there is a demure asterisk corresponding to another asterisk at the bottom of the page. Published there, for all to see, are three words: ‘not being published’. Not being published! Why? The allegation is that terrorists and arms traffickers used British banks to conduct their illegal trade – and that the intelligence services were ...”

“... is deliberately established with the doomed King Pentheus, of Euripides’s Bacchae, but the Norman King escapes ritual dismemberment and triumphs by admitting the Dionysian element in his own personality. This is indeed strange company for a contemporary novel to be keeping – but The Masque of St Eadmundsburg is a very strange book, which points to ...”

“... aggressive hosts. About the only relief he gets is when Daphna the welder’s wife sticks it to Norman Mailer in a big way. It is a triumphant section of the novel – comic, scary, vibrant, seething with observation. This is just what Israel feels like to the eight-day visitor (whether Roth will get any thanks when the book is read over there is an ...”

“... and rarely clunk as they’re dropped in. He makes historical details earn their place on the page by doing more than one job. The wretched parrots serve not only as objects of Shardlake’s pity but as a critique of England’s nouveaux riches and their craving for exotica, and as an image of England turned Babel. Scarnsea, the Benedictine monastery ...”