“... put the question like that there was no way for the writer to win. Outsiders (like Dreiser, like Fitzgerald) coming to the city to impose their vision on it, or insiders (Wharton, also Fitzgerald) trapped in the forms of a dying culture, struggling to liberate themselves, all of them momentarily succeeding before being ...”

“... by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a ...”

“... of women’s autobiography; Heilbrun and Wagner-Martin agree that Nancy Milford’s study of Zelda Fitzgerald in 1970, coinciding with the early years of the women’s movement, established a new openness and frankness in the writing of biography, as well as illuminating a paradigmatic life – the Wife of the Poet. ‘There was a sense, in the late Sixties ...”

“... by the exiled Madame de Staël, that it was this street that she missed most of all – whilst Robert Brasillach lived in the more elongated ugliness of the Rue Lecourbe, not far removed. But when they were in Spain, at the time of the Civil War, they were on different sides, and the books they wrote about the war were in sharp contrast one to the ...”

“... of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or bourgeois, Calvinist or ...”

“... is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t required. A Brighton film of two years earlier, Robert Hamer’s delightfully sinister Pink String and Sealing Wax, set, to judge by the costumes, in the 1880s, does indeed have ‘Victorianism’ written all over it, as does Hamer’s subsequent Kind Hearts and Coronets. But neither of these is scrutinised by ...”

“... so interesting as the memoir of Margaret Canby, though the years it covers saw the death of Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson’s marriage to and divorce from Mary McCarthy, a new marriage, the first seven years at the New Yorker, the publication of To the Finland Station, Memoirs of Hecate County, The Wound and the Bow, and six other books, to say nothing of a world ...”

“... marching forward to social conquests and economic disasters. She first dabbled in politics via Robert Antelme, a charming man with a reputation for generosity, a ‘saint’ according to his friends, who were never inclined to say the same of Marguerite. After much toing and froing in an I-love-you-but-can’t-marry-you vein, Marguerite and ...”

“... are fiction under another name, heirs to such earlier romance memoirs and traveller’s tales as Robert Paltock’s The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, the memoirs of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and the better-known Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy. But Saunders’s readings lucidly reveal the origins of the continuing, ever growing eagerness of audiences to feel ...”

“... celebrity on the Havana scene: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Johnny Mathis performed in its nightclubs. George Raft practically moved in. The Cuban kleptocracy was too good to be true, and too good to last. And the seeds of its undoing sprouted at the same time as all the hotels and casinos, courtesy of ...”

“... pulled the piece in the second edition and admonished the journalist. Even Brady is persuaded that Robert Wise’s defensive protestations about the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons amount to a proven charge of obscurity and indecisiveness on Welles’s part. But the memo from Welles to Wise that he quotes from as evidence is perfectly ...”

“... divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place ...”

“... book editors made themselves great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad ...”

“... her tremulous, shy, disingenuous smile and saying Halloo with the dying fall of an F. Scott Fitzgerald chick spinning giddily to hell’. Carter establishes her dirty atmospherics with superb swiftness and confidence – some extravagant and dangerous players, a seedy Gothic neighbourhood both real and set-like. But she seems not to know what to do with ...”

“... of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard drinking of the writers around Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Actors were even encouraged in their cups by movie fans. According to the pioneer producer J. Stuart Blackton, ‘Prohibition ... brought about the unique situation of reminiscent and heartfelt applause from the audience whenever a man ...”