“... rich). For most of his career, he received equal parts criticism and acclaim. To get Crumb, as the art director Françoise Mouly wrote (in appreciation), one had to reckon with his ‘occasionally repulsive depictions of women, blacks and Jews, and his endless graphic representations of kinky, smelly, sweaty sex’. Twenty-five years after Zap, he was still ...”

“... of their masters. Separately, they show how the academic memoir can be an embarrassment or an art form. Jane Gallop’s streetwise voice in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment reminds me of the scene in The Mirror Has Two Faces when Barbra Streisand, playing a frumpy, unconditionally lovable Columbia University English professor, has a makeover and ...”

“... of the novelist’s work in some quarters. Perhaps Keneally will come to wish that he had done as Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer-prize-winning Maus, has done: turned down Spielberg’s film offer.) Keneally is one of those rare writers whose work is widely accessible yet also of real sinew and complexity. He is too fine a novelist not to subvert ...”

“... often prompts. Another of these objections, also levelled at Amis, is that beyond a certain point, art about human suffering becomes inconceivable – that as, Adorno claimed, ‘after Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a ...”

“... Exit Wounds (2007), a missing-person story set in present day Tel Aviv. The trend began with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first graphic novel to cross over into the literature market, in which the author memorably depicts himself at the cartoonist’s table, as a man in a mouse mask. The suitability of the comics medium to historical narratives ...”

“... table manners. This is a strategy familiar from other Holocaust stories – think of Art Spiegelman’s depiction of his irascible survivor father in Maus – where it serves as a bulwark against what Spiegelman calls ‘Holokitsch’. But in Segal’s work, that piercing honesty exposes everyone. The ...”