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“... she said to a friend, ‘we’re good at media images.’ But as she wrote in her picaresque novel Don Quixote, ‘even a woman who has the soul of a pirate … who is a freak in our society, needs a home.’Acker, Kraus thinks, staked her all on a bid to become a ‘Great Writer as Countercultural Hero’, a position no woman had held before her, and I’m ...”

“... Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one. Byron, Don Juan For the last few weeks, I’ve left the blue-sheathed national edition of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m. each morning, and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten hours ...”

“... example, was regarded during his busy heyday as only one step up from a Poverty Row director, like Don Siegel in the next generation. Though I hardly realised it at the time – and I was there for every showing – the Howard Hawks retrospective season at the National Film Theatre in the early 1960s was a feat of rediscovery as well as organisation. The ...”

“... collateral damage of those adulterous games of musical beds. In 1997 the phenomenally gifted David Foster Wallace caused a ruckus in the pages of the New York Observer when, between wallops at Updike’s Toward the End of Time (‘a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of ...”

“... greed and the recession’, it was called ‘Who Ate All the Pies?’, and I’m afraid I don’t know the answer, because I went to ‘Rethinking Freedom in an Illiberal Age: Securing Rights or Celebrating Liberty?’ instead. I’d bought a two-day ticket at £80, for which I got a red plastic bracelet. I had to keep it on overnight, the man told ...”

“... Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in no ...”

“... being right up behind him … The life of their children belongs to adults of my generation, who don’t want to let their youth get away from them twice.’ Her most recent assignment is Valentine Galtan, a girl of 15, ‘nymphomaniac’, ‘hyperactive’, ‘coked up to the eyeballs’ and eavesdropped on by Lucie every morning as she stuffs ‘her face ...”

“... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard ...”

“... on the black market so that its victims fill the hospitals. ‘Victims?’ Harry says. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Holly. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever?’ This speech, as written, marks Harry as evil, yet since the writer is Greene, Harry is perversely on the side of life, while his ...”

“... This truth to the ideals of a handcrafted world, and the social relations which it would foster, simplified – or blinkered – his view of things; he could believe in solutions where a more worldly commentator would see no hope. Called in to advise on the planning of Jerusalem at the time of the Balfour Declaration, he encouraged Chipping ...”

“... here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first. Q. Is this fiction or autobiography? A. I don’t know. He uses both words, and sometimes calls it a novel. Indeed, sometimes he seems to think of each individual volume as a separate novel, which may give us a clue. As for autobiography, he does use real names, which is part of the uproar over this ...”

“... The Manchurian Candidate began as a novel by Richard Condon, who with Don DeLillo has done more to anatomise and dramatise the world of covert action than any ‘authorised’ chronicler. Before discussing Norman Mailer’s magisterial bid for dominance in this field, I want to use Richard Condon to anticipate a common liberal ...”

“... consequences to the many poor wretches who acted the Sancho Panza to his more than idiotic Don Quixote’. Slowly and without much difficulty, the British infiltrated his organisation. Nonetheless, the movement to bomb Britain continued sporadically over the next few years. Its culmination was Dynamite Saturday in January 1885, noted by James in ...”

“... had a camera, a bush hat and carried no weapon), introduced himself as an adviser and said: ‘Don’t forget to write about the ARVN! It’s their war, too!’ I said I would, and indeed did, prophetically: ‘It is on these little men in their oversize American helmets that the future of South Vietnam will ultimately depend.’ As a battle, Attleboro was ...”

“... sitting room with the twinkling lights outside.‘You go to bed in the house that keeps you safe, don’t you?’ said Zainu Deen, the father of Zainab Deen, who lived in Flat 115 on the 14th floor with her son, Jeremiah. Everybody said that Zainab had always been independent: she left home at 18 and worked all the hours she could at the Chelsea and ...”