“... should do things much less ambiguously: their acts cannot be filtered through the head of John Dowell, the rich American simpleton (if indeed that is what he is) who tells the story. Moreover Dowell has to be there with the others, objectively represented as well as in voice-over; and it is beyond the power of any actor to play an impotent bonehead ...”

“... he says, ‘my family’s there.’ He seems to get on well enough with his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), who is a doctor and a strong campaigner for abortion rights. She is very close to his mode of thought when she borrows one of the best/worst jokes from the novel. ‘You’re in a boat and your motor cuts out, but you’re in shallow water, but ...”

“... comparison, even if his first job there is as a counter of fleas among the waiting immigrants on Ellis Island. But then Céline quite liked America, for having given him two sources of pleasure: the cinema, which dealt, as he wanted to, in states of ‘delirium’, and girls, because American girls had the muscular, dancers’ legs that he thrived on, and so ...”

“... veins. McInerney (who was five years old in 1960) is the leading connoisseur with Bret Easton Ellis (who was not born in 1960) of a Nineties decadent chic. It’s that time of the century again, and McInerney’s style here and in his earlier bestseller Bright Lights, Big City is strikingly similar to 1890s Fin de Siècle, if one replaces absinthe with ...”

“... literary world noticed about Dale Peck was his youth. Now 28, he produced the harrowing Martin and John (attractively published in Britain as Fucking Martin) at 25. Why do we expect so little of the (not all that) young? Peck’s sophistication needs no excuse or applause on those grounds. There is something far more remarkable about him within the youth ...”

“... like her most wanted; she answered, ‘Age and experience.’ I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell) what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, ‘Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.’ I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellect ...”

“... be traced as an influence in Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry, and her sort of Gothic fantasy in John Hawkes. In spite of this, when her books reappear it doesn’t seem to be so much in response to a public demand as because the time has come once again for a reappraisal. Has she a place of her own, in or outside the Modernist movement? I don’t think ...”

“... is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic. To a large extent he made the subject he was ...”

“... in general. The past itself is alterable, since the future casts it in a new light. Whether John Milton belonged to a species which ended up destroying itself is up to us and our progeny. The future possibilities of Hamlet are part of the play’s meaning, even though they may never be realised. One of the finest English novels, Samuel Richardson’s ...”

“... book. As for Lolita (to which he had contributed by sending Nabokov an inspiring study by Havelock Ellis of a Russian nymphet-hunter), Wilson had absolutely no time for it. Mr Karlinsky assures us that he remained silent on Pale Fire and found Ada unreadable. So the two men grew apart. The surprising thing is that, given their temperamental differences, they ...”

“... John Betjeman was nicely eccentric, and droll in a way mysteriously suited to English taste. His being so droll allowed him to display an out-of-the-way learning that might otherwise have seemed remote and ineffectual, but on which it was his gift to confer a certain centrality. He liked to seem lazy, which is why, having repeatedly failed the easy examination in Divinity then compulsory at Oxford, he went down without a degree ...”

“... the Brat Pack writers of the late Eighties, whose three ‘founders’, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, remain its only viable practitioners; or the so-called New Narrativists of the first half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers ...”

“... intangible feminine principle. True, a similar principle was being evoked in the early Thirties by John Cowper Powys, when he commended Dorothy Richardson for having dredged up her novels ‘out of the abyss of feminine consciousness’; and there’s Virginia Woolf’s famous comment on the same set of novels, when she noted their author’s mastery over what ...”

“... be printed beautifully and I’ll sign them all. They’ll be put into portfolios and be sold. John Loker and I got drunk in Ireland last summer and he and I and Nicky Watts decided to bicycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer. I had not ridden a bike since I was a schoolboy, but they were pretty fit. So I ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”