“... self-involvement doesn’t grate. Narcissism comes in many flavours, and Ellis’s has a nice soothing vocal quality, perfect for earbud listening on long rides. No matter how mellow Ellis manages to sound, however, he retains a knack for maddening people, for saying just the right wrong thing to make his legions of detractors swirl like ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... aisles. They’d vomit. Break guitars over each other’s heads. You can’t be having that on a nice train.’ You’ll find the same sentiment echoing around the hostelries of Dublin’s Temple Bar, where stag nights have been banned, proprietors believing that the Ryanair generation has made a mockery of the art of running amok. Over on cheap flights from ...”

“... to work three days a week so long as I didn’t try to do anything else, the usual line was how nice it’d be to work only on alternate days. Describing the symptoms again and again gets very boring. But no matter how hard I tried to explain that I couldn’t read, or that I was in far too much pain to get outside at all or, later, that most of the time I ...”

“... glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... tells us more than we ought to know for sure about the range of things to follow. This is too nice a book to be quite what, as I understand her, the author intended it to be. The energy and ambition of Herself in Love, a collection of 13 stories by Marianne Wiggins, are most strikingly exhibited in the book’s variety of styles and situations. A waitress ...”

“... campy romps such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, political dramas (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon), and TV travelogues (Vidal in Venice). With the exception of John Updike, no American novelist of the postwar period has shown as much disinterested devotion to criticism as a regular practice (as opposed to an easy way to keep your name in print ...”

“... glad,” he said.’ One afternoon, Lewis read Aykroyd Arthur Koestler’s article on Richard Hillary, the fighter pilot and author of The Last Enemy. On 25 May Lewis had written to Gweno: ‘What twaddle of Koestler’s about him being wilfully led to a fascinating death!’ Now his voice cracked as he came to a passage that described a time ...”

“... cardboard boxes filled with mementos and ephemera (there were over 600 in his estate). In a nice twist Koestenbaum adopts a nickname that Warhol dropped early on, ‘Andy Paperbag’, which evokes not only his compulsion to collect but also the fragility of this protective device. More ominously, he writes of the Campbell’s Soup Cans and Brillo Boxes ...”

“... nations was a glamorous thing to do: now the Agency has all but disappeared. With the advent of Richard Nixon, who sought the segregationist vote by emulating some of George Wallace’s worst traits, all this changed. Wallace had campaigned against ‘pointy-headed bureaucrats’ and Nixon derided government workers, though they kept the Government going ...”

“... likes.’ Caesar sent up Welk variously as ‘Lonnie Bilk’ and ‘Ricky Tick’. ‘Hi there, nice Americans,’ Tick says in one spoof, promising ‘another programme of toe-tapping, tip-tapping, toe-tipping, tap-topping, toe-tipping tempo tunes’. TV turned America into a chucklehead nation. Caesar could parody Welk’s mediocrity, but he couldn’t ...”

“... professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to ...”

“... closed for cleaning) in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”