“... and she married a succession of men who made her something else: one introduced her to bohemia and Henry Miller, another was an English peer who introduced her to H.D., another a military historian. She seems to have lived very comfortably, in Washington DC and New York City. She had two children. She travelled widely. All this is vaguely sketched because ...”

“... Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t doing interesting locals. I have no doubt they were there to be found in the ...”

“... what could be described as my first appearance in print. The actual copy I have belonged to Betty Miller, and it is in her article, which is called ‘Amazons and Afterwards’, that I appear, anonymously and representatively, as Afterwards. The journal’s editorial includes me too, as one of the pony-tailed generation of young women, clones of Francoise ...”

“... redskins and palefaces. Redskins are bearded bards and pagan guzzlers of experience (Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, the Beats, and that honorary American, D.H. Lawrence); palefaces, the tightly-buttoned patrician ministers of culture, society and manners (William Dean Howells, Henry James, T. S. Eliot). Although Moody ...”

“... shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen Eighty-Four ...”

“... as they make their way to the annual convention of the Modern Languages Association. J. Hillis Miller is one of the handful who matter. Like those mystic few who know the Coca Cola formula, such people shouldn’t be allowed to travel on the same plane. The collective loss would be irreparable. Harvester Press salutes ...”

“... The manuscripts of Henry Cockburn’s letters have been gathered together in the National Library of Scotland, where they cry out for a collected edition. When such an edition appears, they cannot fail to be recognised as a masterpiece of Scottish literature. I came, while engaged in writing a book about Cockburn, to love his letters, and I have even managed to love those which turned up too late for consideration in the book ...”

“... passed him over as successor at the Freudian School in favour of his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, the ringleader of a Parisian cell of Maoist psychoanalysts.Guattari had great plans to write, but he could never sit still, especially with all the distractions which life at La Borde presented. His soixante-huitard friends (La Borde’s director, Jean ...”

“... a kind of subversive solidarity with the tradition of confessional literature which began with Henry Miller. Edward Limonov is now living in Paris. Perhaps his next work will be a Nouveau Roman. It would be easy to think of this review simply as a prolegomenon to Philip Roth’s new novel, The Anatomy Lesson. This is about history, and Jewishness, and ...”

“... in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was in my Enid ...”

“... by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is pretty ...”

“... been allotted an important pew in church and it seems she had friendly relations with the local miller and maltster. Life didn’t get much better than this for an alewife in a 17th-century village. Rason must have been a trusted as well as a prominent member of the community: the records show that packets of silk were left in her alehouse by middlemen to ...”

“... remarks about the Commune. ‘Also, we have discovered eroticism. We are going to translate Henry Miller.’ (How good an idea is this?) Outside, in the streets, trainee pornographers crouch over upturned beer-crates selling the first Bulgarian girlie mags – while plastic-wrapped stacks of the Kama Sutra (local version, 64 pages approx.) are ...”

“... sold out and had adulatory reviews. The Shankars met Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller, and over the next few years travelled all over Europe and eventually to the US, where Ravi heard Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, beginning a lifelong fascination with New York.Ravi began taking small dance parts ...”

“... an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona (where he gets drunk with Hemingway), is recruited to Naval Intelligence by Ian Fleming and dispatched to Portugal to spy on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, becomes a prisoner of war in ...”