“... me sometimes with his anti-semitism and childish fascism that I cannot write to him’. When Edmund Wilson wanted to republish some early letters of mine I made him change ‘Jews’ to ‘New York people’ in the text. What more can a man do? At the same time I supported Ezra’s release from the nuthouse, for impeccable reasons, and gifted him ...”

“... for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the English can do a certain kind of novel – intelligent, ironic, and just this side of penetrating – better than anybody else’. From the first sentence of the ...”

“... was an intellectual. But there is no chapter on Diderot. Nor, with the equivocal exception of Edmund Wilson, described as an admirable writer and investigator who was also a violent drunk, are there chapters on any other virtuous intellectuals. Orwell is named as a man who tried, as Wilson did, to investigate and ...”

“... the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth ...”

“... me.This isn’t a sob story. I liked Cambridge, and then I moved to London and I like it here too. Edmund Wilson described Washington DC as ‘a hollow shell’ – ‘no trouble to clean it out every night and put something else in [its] place’ – and that’s the way I think of London: a hollow shell in which each person makes their own city, over ...”

“... and artists it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by ...”

“... desperate. When he spends a lot of time demonstrating Nabokov’s debating triumph over his friend Edmund Wilson he is once more out of focus. He imitates Nabokov’s performance in gently chiding his friend Hitchens for cherishing a remnant of Trotskyism because he does not understand that Trotsky also means Terror. We all want to know as much as ...”

“... of his, or Anne Tyler for the limpness of hers. As for the books, they speak for themselves. Edmund Wilson once remarked of Powell that ‘he’s just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.’ This was presumably intended as a put-down, but to anyone but a literary critic it surely comes as a great recommendation, and should be ...”

“... Known Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which ...”

“... Basil is Waugh’s version of Marlow, a man possessed of the indomitable urge to survive – Edmund Wilson called it ‘perverse, unregenerate self-will’ – that characterises his greatest shits. A cadge and a waster who has grown bored of his desultory life in London (‘Isn’t London hell?’), Basil travels to the remote land of Azania. There ...”

“... were people he knew, noting Whitman’s ‘good humour’, Joyce’s ‘tireless self-regard’, Edmund Wilson’s ‘dogged honesty’. In a coy foreword, he pretends to be diffident about his criticism (‘Another book. Another slain forest’), and sets himself up as an amateur, dabbling in criticism to pay his alimony. But for all his good-natured ...”

“... individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in Eliot’s later years, the uncompromising seriousness of F.R. Leavis’s ...”

“... I do not resent it. I look upon it as very natural.’ In the face of attacks from the likes of Edmund Wilson (who called him ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers who do not care much about writing’), Maugham could, and did, point to his supersized audience, implying that you’d have to be very ...”

“... Thus the prominent Anglo-American critics from 1900 to 1950 – for example, Leavis, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling – produce essentially essayistic work, legislating, setting up evaluative hierarchies, and at their worst, attitudinising. The major Central and East European critics of this period – figures like Auerbach, Spitzer, Bakhtin ...”

“... Laputan excesses which have resulted (appendices of hyphen lists, for instance) were satirised by Edmund Wilson. Within academic circles there have been ferocious, quasi-theological disputes as to whether copy-text be first or last published version in the author’s lifetime, whether it should follow old or new spelling, and what should be done with ...”