“... actress and entrepreneur will once more set a trend. But a cautionary note is in order. As Susan Bordo suggests in Unbearable Weight, her recent study of our collective fixation on thinness – discussed here by Carol Gilligan (LRB, 10 March) – this would not be the first time in current memory that popular magazines heralded a turn toward a ...”

“... lecture, with examples, demonstrating that Ephron was the world’s worst writer, even worse than Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal and Renata Adler. A few years later, I would understand the hatred when Ephron wrote a very funny account (‘The Legend’) of her mother throwing Lillian out of a party.Great reporting isn’t usually harmed by the reporter having a ...”

“... my passion. In the absence of Maria, our hero might have diddled one of those undulant oaks. Like Susan Cheever’s Home before Dark and Kaylie Jones’s Lies My Mother Never Told Me, Alexandra Styron’s Reading My Father is further evidence that growing up as the daughter of a famous writer can mean growing up feeling like a background drawing, even an ...”

“... of a cranky, uneven, occasionally pretentious kind. His work has always divided opinion. For every Susan Sontag hailing him as ‘the most exciting new American writer to appear in years’, there was an Irving Howe slapping him down: ‘Reading this collection prompts one to wish that Leonard Michaels had never heard of ...”

“... worse, he says, ‘by lying to him about my whereabouts and state of fitness’. The luckless Don Howe, who Adams liked and respected, was, he thinks, happier at Wimbledon ‘than dealing with some of the problem players he had at Arsenal’. The most powerful manager during Adams’s time at Arsenal – excluding for the moment Arsène Wenger – was George ...”

“... have had their say. There are essays from many of the old Partisan crowd, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, William Barrett, Philip Rahv; a compassionate reminiscence from Harry Levin, who was much abused by Schwartz when they were neighbours in Cambridge in 1940; there are Lowell’s elegies and Berryman’s Dreamsongs, and even an awkward commemoration on his ...”

“... the historically pro-Shah and pro-colonial forces, as represented by politicians like Geoffrey Howe and George Bush and business spokesman like Lord Shawcross, have found themselves able to resist the allure of The Satanic Verses and even to anticipate with a writhe of embarrassment its effect on the tender parts of the Ayatollah. Anyway, when it comes to ...”

“... Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning for Paris’, and in September 1939 arrived in Manhattan by Greyhound bus. She enrolled at Columbia, embarking on a doctorate in 17th-century ...”

“... Heavy artillery pieces by such as Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Leslie Fiedler and Irving Howe begin appearing more frequently on the cover of the magazine and circulation rises. ‘I was now a personage,’ Podhoretz announces, as if auditioning for a knighthood. He’s also out from under his writer’s block, cranking out regular articles for ...”

“... guides Robbe-Grillet in choosing one object for description rather than another?’ Irving Howe asked in a mocking review. ‘Why a tomato rather than a cucumber?’ Another, related misconception, which Barthes was also responsible for spreading, was that Robbe-Grillet required ‘only one mode of perception: the sense of sight’. Never mind that his ...”

“... than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s personal style. In her ...”