“... compared Israel to apartheid South Africa; and he bought a copy of The Penitent by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Lasdun found himself identifying with the novel’s protagonist, Joseph Shapiro, a ‘regular flawed and fallen human being’ like him until he bought a ticket to Israel and returned to the faith of his fathers. Lasdun ...”

“... called Manly triumphs, The plumage of love. The mock serenade reverses the usual direction of a singer’s praise: Guglielmo and Ferrando vaunt their own charms, not the beauty of their love objects. And beneath the froth and wit, the scene stages a double demand: the young women are being asked to look at the Orientals without being prejudiced against them ...”

“... Mourning (1965), dust-jacketed in tasteful purple, into my hands for a review. An assiduous hymn-singer, I had long realised that centuries other than ours had different views on the subject, especially when I came across Charles Wesley’s verses (written in August 1744 on the morrow of a Cardiff Methodist’s funeral) whose rollicking anapaests were widely ...”

“... to erect such a building, and into the impasse plunged the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardner, Joseph Paxton, who enlarged his design for the famous glass and iron conservatory at Chatsworth into what Punch promptly dubbed the Crystal Palace. This glorious network of glass and colourfully painted iron supports in Hyde Park represented the ultimate ...”

“... out to be McCarthy’s last crusade; in a formal and spectacular sense, his career ended when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been ...”

“... of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens. The statue celebrated Peter’s building of St Petersburg, that symbol of Russia’s Westernisation which Francesco Algarotti called her window on Europe (Pushkin cited ...”

“... people having fun without you.’When she graduated from Hollywood High in 1961, Babitz wrote to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.’ That year her family travelled to Europe so that her father, Sol, a contract violinist for ...”

“... reindeer herdsman’s pointed felt cap with earflaps, like a Norman battle helmet reconfigured by Joseph Beuys. It is warm. Kötting’s thick white gypsum facemask is melting. Later, coming into the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells, as a sharp wind from the east begins to bite, he puts on a kneelength transparent rain cape under the jacket of his suit, giving ...”

“... idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not intrinsically more ...”

“... unequivocally deserving on straight literary criteria – O’Neill, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Singer, Bellow, Morrison. There are others – Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck and John Steinbeck – for whom non-literary factors seem to have been at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have always had what Graham Greene called a ...”

“... book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and ...”

“... as John Proctor is a kinsman of the upholders of the Scarlet Letter: they are each sons of the singer of himself in Walt Whitman, or of the powerful American addressee, Ishmael. Loman bears a relation to the figment and self-projection that is Jay Gatsby, as much as to that newly self-aware, post-immigrant landlubber Augie March. Miller’s lasting gift to ...”

“... of mind, all of which are virtually unknown in Italy, except by some sophisticated readers of Joseph Roth, Bellow, Singer, Malamud, Potok, and of course yourself. Personally, I am satisfied with this book, mainly because I had good fun planning and writing it. For the first and only time in my life as a writer, I had ...”

“... opinions, particularly about the Forties and Fifties. We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish ...”