“... terse lyricism, and worldly wisdom about the workings of power, bring to mind the short stories of Paul Bowles and Deborah Eisenberg. Remarkably for a writer of her generation (she was born in 1962), Egan seemed like an expatriate, looking back with biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of ...”

“... It was only when I got to the chapter featuring two people whose work I happen to know and love, Paul Bowles and Jean Genet, that the spell was broken. All of a sudden, this oddfellow’s odyssey didn’t feel quite so whimsical – it felt borderline exploitative, as though she was using these people, or their memory, to make herself look good. ...”

“... as Finnegans Wake), as well as early texts by Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, H.D., Laura Riding and Paul Bowles. Sarraute found a kindred spirit in Jolas, someone who shared her own aesthetic sensibilities. She would remain a lifelong friend, and later became Sarraute’s translator. Jolas and her friends must have inspired Sarraute, for although she wrote ...”

“... of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing ...”

“... like some lesser piece of Frederic Raphael university-and-after, not Colegate territory at all. Paul Bowles’s short stories concentrate almost entirely on sense of place, or at least of place dominating character and directing it. Bowles has lived for many years in Tangier, and most of the stories are set ...”

“... while housed such diverse inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially terrible housemate, complaining about excessive use of toilet paper and telling people their colds weren’t physical but mental.) Carson was one ...”

“... Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas’. Here I sit ...”

“... She looked away and crumpled up the paper and put it on the fire. I was ten years old when John Paul II came to power. My granny instantly adored him, loving his feudal side without reservation and simply ignoring the freedom-upholding aspect. The only thing she was truly agnostic about was politics: she never mentioned that, and her only concern when it ...”

“... in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle ...”

“... Red Indians and to jazz, which is the one original flower of American civilisation.’ The writer Paul Engle said of Ginsberg: ‘He succeeded in doing the heretofore utterly impossible – bringing dirt to India.’ Baker gives us a glimpse of Ginsberg as seen through the eyes of the founder of Krittibas, Sunil Gangopadhyay: They were astonished to see ...”

“... nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan ...”

“... as exciting as we were led to believe. I’m thinking here particularly of a recent interview with Paul McCartney where he explained that when he and Mick smoked what he described charmingly as ‘pot’ together (after dinner, with a nice glass of wine apparently) all that happened was that they ‘discussed art’. I remember ’68, and let me assure ...”

“... there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, and another of birds,’ he quotes St Paul), these letters contain some extraordinary descriptions of birds and beasts. From 1949 on he and Suzanne rented rooms near Ussy-sur-Marne, then bought a patch of land, then in 1953 built a small house on it. Beckett’s pleasure in digging the ground to ...”

“... immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs of the Thames Gateway, of a triumphalist police outing, a reunion for veterans of the Battle of Orgreave. A reunion attended, in true British fashion, by a ...”

“... the media. As their marriage deteriorated, and as Charles took up again with Camilla Parker-Bowles, it is as easy to understand why the Princess encouraged her friends to talk to Andrew Morton as it is to understand that the Prince was horrified and humiliated when Diana: Her True Story appeared. For someone as lonely, insecure and unhappy as ...”