“... How excessive was the excess of the past? Scott Fitzgerald may have decided that the very rich are different from you and me, but they live in our own time; so we can begin to comprehend their wealth, even when spent on private jets, triplex penthouses or million-dollar birthday parties. The scales for measuring wealth in the past seem less certain, when the contemporary value of a pound or louis or scudo is difficult to fix except in terms of relatively abstract comparisons ...”

“... and introduces us. Logan Mountstuart – Ernest Hemingway. The pointy-faced man is, inevitably, Scott Fitzgerald; later on, with equal inevitability, a sentence about Tender is the Night is followed by one about jazz. Mountstuart himself, on the other hand, remains strangely insubstantial. He does things and meets people, but it’s hard to get much ...”

“... Thirlwell’s narrator, in other words, badly wants to be the kind of novelist – Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann are among those he quotes, according to the postscript – who could make Literature out of the thin delusions of a reprobate like Haffner. Unless, of course, it is Thirlwell who wants to be that novelist, in which case The ...”

“... after the Civil War, while Europe had to wait for the industrial impetus of the 1914 conflict. As Scott Fitzgerald wisely observed, culture follows money, so by the time he was enjoying the Twenties and dunking Zelda in the Plaza fountain New York was where it was at. Manhattan is not New York, and New York, as people fall asleep telling you, is not ...”

“... imagination to adventure into newness.’ In seminars, students asked about the relevance of Scott Peck to Jane Austen, and posed New Age questions on the courtship rituals of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Suppose Elizabeth Bennet said to her parents: “I’ve found a life partner I really love, and she’s a woman”?’ Though I had asked for a modern ...”

“... the latter always be accepted as the truth? Or when Hemingway writes (in A Moveable Feast) that Scott Fitzgerald admitted to having been a virgin before he married Zelda, and the English actress Rosalinde Fuller writes that, on the contrary, she had a passionate affair with Fitzgerald before his marriage, should her ...”

“... revolted by that book, and American intellectuals have never put him beside Faulkner, Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. And on the Continent there is no translation of Waugh as audacious as Avanti Jeeves.And yet even those who praise him nearly always begin by dissociating themselves from what they regard as his bigotry, his snobbery, his cruelty, his ...”

“... to a personal anecdote, and then back to literature: In a famous episode of A Moveable Feast, F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses concern about the size of his penis, Zelda having said it was inadequately small; and Hemingway suggests he compare himself with what is to be found on classical statues, saying that most men would be satisfied with that. In my ...”

“... on Beckett’s Film, as well as a two-volume work on cinema), on literature (Lewis Carroll, Zola, Scott Fitzgerald, Artaud, Proust, Melville, Whitman, Kafka, Beckett and T.E. Lawrence, among others), and on painting (including an essay on the French artist Gérard Fromanger which likens painting to cookery). He wrote in the preface to Différence et ...”

“... in war but hunting, fishing, shooting, whoring, drinking, fathering kids, being a friend to F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce etc. The only way they noticed I injured myself was because I could not spell hemmorage and still cannot. But it is very easy to injure yourself up here. Everybody is drunk all the time – it is the thing to be, like snotty in ...”

“... is pitching it a bit strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Tailor and Cutter and Journal des Tailleurs; he has studied a history of the Hawaiian shirt and he knows where to put his hand on the fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue. His objective approach is praised ...”

“... in Gath, which gives a devastating picture of thoroughly modern Brethren, modishly referring to Scott Fitzgerald and Pan Am jumbo jets bound for South Korea, slapping God on the back in prayer, competitively singing hymns in alternate lines (gallery v. floor, under-forties v. over-forties), and ‘pretending self-indulgently that if Christ was not ...”

“... her tremulous, shy, disingenuous smile and saying Halloo with the dying fall of an F. Scott Fitzgerald chick spinning giddily to hell’. Carter establishes her dirty atmospherics with superb swiftness and confidence – some extravagant and dangerous players, a seedy Gothic neighbourhood both real and set-like. But she seems not to know what ...”

“... roll-call of writer-enthusiasts: Horace, Sidney, Marlowe, Byron, Arnold, Brooke, Gide, Scott Fitzgerald and, most recently, Charles Sprawson. It is true, of course, that Vladimir Nabokov was a keen roller-skater back in Berlin in the Twenties. More recently, my own novel The Limits of Vision included an extravagantly irrelevant vignette of a ...”

“... Voltaire, Napoleon and Alfred de Musset; Harry’s Bar, near the Opéra, resurrected Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Nor need such nostalgia be confined to France: Philip Hope-Wallace at El Vino’s, Dylan Thomas in the Fitzroy and the Yorkshire Grey, W. H. Auden at the Hope and Anchor in Birmingham. Since we cannot all share in the intimacy of the ...”