“... of realism which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory quotes from Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke on the cover of this new gathering of previously uncollected or unpublished writings, Ann Quin now seems to be emerging as their best ancestor. She has all the biographical qualifications for the job of precursor, as well as being ...”

“... Martha, who stalked his rooms and disrupted his concentration with her demonic stare. Harrison and Tom had lunch every Tuesday with Donald Barthelme, who was at the height of his fame after being named ‘the most interesting writer of fiction in America’ in the New York Times Magazine. ‘We have a little block association,’ Barthelme told the Paris ...”

“... delivering him back at his flat I found that, even before I got home, I had started to cry. Karl Miller writes: A few weeks ago I visited Frank in Cambridge. I had known him for 52 years, and for much of that time I had been his editor, publishing him first in 1958, when he was a lecturer at Reading University. In a style of the period, I was warned against ...”

“... from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this anthology hands over to Nicholas Spice, who in turn sensibly makes sure that Karl Miller’s long essay about the LRB heads the list of contents. This essay is to be relished, not least when it is most ...”

“... and communal showers. ‘In stark contrast to the push-button extravagance below,’ Russell Miller noted in Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy, ‘the furnishing of the dormitories abruptly takes on the aspect of a rather parsimonious girls’ boarding school.’ They kept him busy: Hefner claims to have trumped Casanova, logging more than two thousand ...”

“... a matter of renewed literary and philosophical concern. I have in mind the recent work of Hillis Miller (The Ethics of Reading), Tobin Sieber (The Ethics of Criticism), Alisdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) and Barbara Hernnstein Smith (Contingencies of Value). What Booth has rediscovered is that ethical criticism is in a sense a redundancy, since all ...”

“... Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in the love-act and simultaneous orgasm, are passed down from master or mistress to hand-picked pupil in certain rare and long-delayed bouts of sexual ...”

“... as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I contributed the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at Edinburgh, had ...”

“... Britain, no doubt because they happened to be around the house at the time. The young Thomas read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason at the age of 13 and became a lifelong freethinker: in 1925, he was to compose a foreword to the collected works of Paine. He started to lose his hearing at an early age and always said later that it helped him concentrate. He was ...”

“... Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found designing mews houses and studios in Camden, Hampstead and Islington, all of course included here. All were a cut above the usual intellectual level of 1980s architects; Colquhoun, who died last ...”

“... death blow but wonders rather whether ‘the feminisation of America’ is one reason we now have Tom Cruise in place of Bogart. A variety of voices are cited. Sharon Waxman in the New York Times attributes the loss of ‘man’s men’ to what she believes (against a good deal of evidence) to be the entirely peaceful and cosseted existence everyone in the US ...”

“... status with charm and good humour’. Henderson introduced Hamilton to Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, the power couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this ...”

“... for the double humiliation inflicted on the government by the Supreme Court at the hands of Gina Miller, apart from apparently serious suggestions that the Supreme Court should be given a less grand name or moved back to the Palace of Westminster where the law lords used to sit, presumably to remind them who’s really in charge.As​ a judge, Laws handed ...”

“... Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his ...”

“... cassette player’. Typographical tricks suit satirists such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who seem to be graffiti-spraying billboards with impudent brio, deploying jazzy effects (italics, caps, boldface, exclamation marks, dashes) to fill a wide canvas. They’re performance artists in print. Pynchon, too. Moody is more of a heartbreak ...”