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“... in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics whirling their ...”

“... catastrophic history in common. ‘Jews are people who are not what anti-semites say they are,’ Philip Roth once wrote, but it is Gilman’s contention in this book that the Jews have tried to become indistinguishable from their enemies: that in the process of assimilation they have had to internalise the anti-semitism of their host nations. Since the ...”

“... Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a ...”

“... recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award in the US. She has been compared to Roth, Bellow and Updike, with whom she shares a loosely generational sense of the significant, a list in which Vietnam, postwar Communist trials, the coming to consciousness of the Jewish community in the US, the assassination of Kennedy and sexual liberation ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel ...”

“... at the end of it all, death’s unrefusable invitation to oblivion), Everyman defines itself in Roth’s ebulliently productive oeuvre precisely by what is missing from it of his irreverence and vitality. Roth’s writing in the novels of the past decade has been distinguished by a powerfully propulsive energy. Reading ...”

“... A crucial incident in Patrimony comes when Roth’s aged and ill father, Herman, ‘beshats himself’, as he puts it:   ‘Don’t tell the children,’ he said, looking up at me from the bed with his one sighted eye.   ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I said. ‘I’ll say you’re taking a rest.’   ‘Don’t tell Claire ...”

“... their latest book. Only once, in this selection, does he not like a book: I Married a Communist by Philip Roth, though nothing happened as a result, and the correspondence fizzles out. He has a feeling for the rigours of old age and writes helpfully to the ill and bereaved. He was always affectionate and rather awestruck by the philosopher Owen ...”

“... 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 New York. But first and foremost, it is about putting on again (joyously?) the hateful harness. In fact, the hateful harness materialises for us in the surgical collar ...”

“... a blue rinse. As we were standing together on a corner in Notting Hill Gate by a red postbox, Philip Roth and I were talking when an Englishman I knew came towards us in the crowd, and I wanted him to see me talking with Philip Roth, but he didn’t see us, and walked past. In one scene – they are all ...”

“... later, Wallace is no longer with us, but two of the Great Male Narcissists he cited, Updike and Philip Roth, are still displaying their self-absorbency and depriving tender young empaths of valuable column inches. With an almost audible sigh, Updike concedes that the pups have a point. ‘He or she may feel, as the grey-haired scribes of the day ...”

“... not be violated; I will not submit myself. I will wait. But I will wait for light, not love.’ In Philip Roth’s serious comedy the control is never less than perfect. It’s impossible to imagine him satisfied with an obscurity. His detachment in Zuckerman Unbound is a real achievement, since this is a self-punishing novel, putting every obstacle in ...”

“... the front of her 1994 Collected Stories, she receives that compliment from both Edmund White and Philip Roth). Still, A Grace Paley Reader, the most recent posthumous collection of her work, in giving some of her lectures and occasional pieces equal space beside samplings of the poems and the better-known stories, celebrates Paley the person as much as ...”

“... has been explored with varying degrees of insight by writers as different as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, James Hynes and even Jonathan Franzen in the opening pages of The Corrections. The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is in a decaying ...”

“... but anyone can obtain files on the dead. When I checked MuckRock, recent requests for files on Philip Roth and V.S. Naipaul were pending. These are paranoid days in America. A couple of weeks ago, a guy who used to work in magazines asked me with a straight face if a journalist friend of mine was a Russian plant. Two of the most celebrated figures of ...”