“... this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism, and cultural phenomena such as the ‘child cult’ exemplified by the regrettable popularity of Charlie ...”

“... sedates. Above all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating the story. Here Naipaul has ...”

“... him soft poppy-seed bun rings from the market, but now she just slept and slept. Woolf and Joyce admired Chekhov, and, faced with Yegorushka’s drifting thought, one sees why: this is a form of stream of consciousness, more natural and less showy than Anna Karenina’s mania at the end of Tolstoy’s novel. ‘Before dying, she had been alive ... but ...”

“... but ... forget it. Bernard Malamud? Unreadable. What about someone as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates? She’s a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium or in Shea or in a field with hundreds of thousands (laughs). She does all the graffiti in the men’s room and the women’s room and in every public toilet from here to ...”

“... breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend’. Unfortunately, that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to ...”

“... the 19th, and stutters to a halt with the hanging of two Second World War collaborators, William Joyce (the despised Lord Haw-Haw, who was born in the United States, was brought up in Ireland and on the basis of long residence had acquired a British passport) and John Amery (scion of a High Tory family, who had moved to Germany after the outbreak of ...”

“... the most extraordinary work of his life, and certainly the most difficult. He said of it – as Joyce said about the professors and Ulysses – that it will ‘keep the pianists busy when it is played fifty years hence’, but Tunbridge reminds us that it took most of the 19th century to gain canonical standing, and remains forbiddingly complex today. It is ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence; he was for years Conrad’s indispensable prop; he was close to his revered Henry James, though perhaps less close than he thought. He was on companionable terms with Wells, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the ungrateful Hemingway. Throughout his life he strove to keep up with les jeunes; Lawrence called him ...”

“... from Sophocles, Coleridge, Mallarmé, Wordsworth, Kafka, Goethe, Valéry, Mann, Gide, Joyce), and starts with a lengthy re-creation of ‘The Polish Years’. Karl brings together a good deal of useful historical background here, emphasising what we, indeed, knew, and Conrad was hardly likely to forget: that Poland was ruthlessly chopped up, and ...”

“... Fiction. Today’s Irish writers, he claims, have inherited a self-confidence ‘and (through Joyce and Beckett) a sense of belonging within the mainstream of European literature’. This simple fact of literary history might also go some way towards explaining the comparative demoralisation of English novelists: perhaps it was our failure to produce a ...”

“... the heroines of slasher bestsellers – FBI agent Clarice in Silence, doctor Kate McTiernan in James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls – these heroines are independent and intelligent. Frannie is a reflective narrator, who thinks a lot about irony, destiny and control: ‘I don’t believe in destiny, although I am sometimes tempted by the freedom implied by ...”

“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... natural world, they sound off key. Yet his taste in fiction was the opposite of folksy. Sterne, Joyce, James and Dostoevsky were among his heroes; he had no time for Kipling or Walter Scott. And while largely avoiding the self-referential, he let his hair down in ‘My Hundredth Tale’, in which a writer living alone in ...”

“... worsen or remedy it. He admires writers who force their language into weird contemporary shapes (Joyce, Pound, Gadda), but his solution is Kafka’s: ‘to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination.’ For this Calvino, drawn to limits, boundaries and impossible ...”

“... though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class coding I have ...”