“... life. At the time of his death, Williams had published five novels (two volumes of People of the Black Mountains appeared posthumously). They have had their admirers, especially the first, Border Country, but on the whole they have seemed distinctly secondary to his theoretical and critical work, and many readers have returned a negative answer to the ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... Watson’s poodle dialectics. After all, it was the not notably socialist Ackroyd who (along with Ian Patterson and Nick Totton) published the first bulletin from the Zappa papers in 1979: stapled small press format. It’s a breeze for Watson to present himself as a schizoid, high-Culture virtuoso who is dedicating years of his life (risking his equilibrium ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... lived in the quasi-monastic style of an academic gypsy, kept a room in his house painted entirely black, and for many years seems to have survived on a diet consisting mostly of blondies (a chocolateless variant on the brownie). Max’s fixation with ‘normality’ (‘Wallace’s childhood was happy and ordinary’) is part of a popularising mission. He ...”

“... the same autocrat, sipping standard glasses of tea, smoking the same cigarettes, lifting identical black telephones to say ‘Nyet!’ in the same dead tone. They too had transcended ethnic and familial differences in the universality of a great empire. But Homo Sovieticus was generally despised as a moronic automaton, while Homo Britannicus is remembered for ...”

“... his own retirement to cries of dismay all round, except from the ‘small young man called Ian Hislop’ who sat ‘tight-lipped’ as Waugh begged Ingrams to stay. After lunch Waugh walked round the corner to the offices of the Literary Review and took up his last job. The Literary Review began life forty years ago, along with the LRB and Quarto, with ...”

“... of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to unionise the near-serfs of the Salinas Valley agribusiness empire. All the strands of ‘the movement’ were still in some kind of ...”

“... telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ – visited the White House to see his good friend Donald Trump. ‘You know, my dad and mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that – you know, not a lot of male energy going ...”

“... can go back to women born over a hundred years ago. A late (and much missed) Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, once told me that as an undergraduate at Cambridge he was put in charge of escorting Gertrude Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady ...”

“... tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first book of non-fiction, Black Ship to Hell, was published in 1962 (‘an exploitation of my discovery that … art is not in opposition to reason’), she began writing for the London Magazine, then for Karl Miller at the New Statesman (and, eventually, the LRB). ...”

“... on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and considers Smith’s Rhodesia a great agricultural success story. By that time the war between ...”

“... one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a drawing of Dracula, and it was going to be on my right arm over my vein. The mouth would be open over the vein, and then when I fixed I could ...”

“... life. ‘The sale of five cattle is starting right now in ring number one,’ the voice said. A black heifer was padding around the ring, its hoofs slipping in sawdust and shit, and the man in charge of the gate, whose overalls were similarly caked, regularly patted it on the rump to keep it moving. Farmers in wellington boots and green waxed jackets hung ...”

“... the speakers do not listen to one another. Of the art of Ford’s friend and collaborator, Conrad, Ian Watt writes in his recent book on that writer’s 19th-century texts: ‘The need to derive moral meaning from physical sensation partly arises from the fact that both the impressionists and the symbolists ... proscribed any analysis, prejudgment, or ...”