“... like the most abject stage-door Johnnies, and indeed Janes. The former First Lady sat in the main booth with her friends, looking serene and detached, while all sorts of people took their time collecting their hats or whatever, and rubbernecking shamelessly.What was this? It was more than fame and more than glamour. And it was a bit less than Edmund Burke’s ...”

“... as in other books of his middle phase, first-person narration predominates. Murnane subscribes to Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author – the person the reader imagines to be behind the work. ‘The ghostly outline of this personage has arisen in my mind,’ Murnane writes, ‘as a result of my having read certain details in the text.’ Since ...”

“... own experience for the first time; throughout his life, writing and reading apart, teaching – at Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton and, from 1954, Minneapolis – was the activity into which he threw most of his energy. ‘A poet is a man speaking to men’: But I am then a poet, am I not? – Ha ha. The radiator, please. Well, what? Alive now – no ...”

“... The film camera, which rattled like a threshing machine, had to be encased in a padded glass booth that inhibited camera angles. And, as is well known, the technology put paid to many silent movie actors, including John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks, whose voices were too high for their heroic personas.‘When talkies came in, the movies imported ...”

“... Yeats and had the odd experience of Seamus talking between us as well as on a screen cocooned in a booth. Afterwards we walked under the fading sign high on a gable-end for Finn’s Hotel, where Nora Barnacle was working when Joyce first met her. There was a nice wind brewing and Seamus was struggling against it. He said: ‘My father used to say to us in the ...”

“... Chevrolet (and this was the season of Don McLean singing ‘American Pie’), my first phone booth, my first cocktail in the bar of a three-dimensional Howard Johnson’s, my first freeway exit, my first white-shingled house with picket fence. Living the movie, I was in that peculiar no man’s land, half-fact, half-fiction, where I remained for ...”

“... of a more modern Anglophone way of talking about these formal questions can be dated to 1961 and Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth has much to say about point of view, but, genially moralistic, declines to deprive the author, or his lay figure the Implied Author, of responsibility for the moral ...”