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“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... cultural baggage searched for hours. Back and forth across the map of modern literature he goes (Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Grass, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Bellow, Malamud...), and back with equal self-assurance to the monuments of the European tradition (Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes...). Although the range both of his current sympathies and of his ...”

“... life-style and because of the attention paid to women writers by the women’s movement. Joyce, Lawrence and Burroughs all had to undergo legal prosecution for their work before notoriety could be translated into celebrity, marginality into the mainstream. For novelists, inevitably, the art world became a model of avant-garde possibility. All the ...”

“... novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably – from ...”

“... and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth sibling, James, has a son called Edward, though his biological father might actually have been Thomas. The family firm, General Roll, deals in player pianos and the punched paper rolls they require. There are assets involved, liabilities and potentially power struggles of ...”

“... power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to ...”

“... literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments ...”

“... translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the King James Bible, if I can use that unfortunate analogy, it is so good – or we have been so educated to see its goodness – that it seems like the real thing. It’s true that I wondered, when Penguin first phoned me, whether Freud sounded different in other ...”

“... from others, without explanation but with occasional comments or character sketches. Letters from Joyce or Woolf or Spender, or Pound or Hayward or Middleton Murry are mixed in with press clippings or missives from bores and autograph hunters and archbishops. Sometimes he sends a variety of enclosures with no accompanying letter: a collage of his life for her ...”

“... artists or writers, as ‘Cash that bloody cheque – for God’s sake, I don’t need it.’ James Knowlson’s biography reports that when his painter friend Henri Hayden was hospitalised in 1962 he looked after the Haydens’ tax bills as well as their rent. Beckett was, in other words, beginning to resemble the otherworldly, saintly figure of later ...”

“... the same passport round here. There were forty to fifty people. Seven hundred cheered a drunken [James] Dickey some months before. I didn’t go to the reception.McGahern was amused by many things and people. There was no telephone in the house in Leitrim on my first visit (‘I’m uneasy on the phone,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘I think it comes from having to ...”

“... but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and ...”

“... him inevitable that he should behave as a member of its established church. He was married in St James’s, Piccadilly, and sometimes he accompanied me to church. How deep this went was not a question that either of us was disposed to pursue, though for different reasons: I because, though, when I went away to school, I encountered boys who were Jews by ...”

“... novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy’, arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was no ...”

“... figures who were coming to be recognised as the leading European Modernists – Proust, Eliot and Joyce. The literature on Wilson repeats several slightly different versions of his remark that (as Dabney reports it) he ‘was never happier than when telling people about a work they were unfamiliar with in a language they didn’t know’. This is certainly ...”