“... least truthful book. But it is a very good one, and it may be the high point of the thing Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism. Capote did not invent it. There were already a fair number of good writers, sound listeners, who were into that sort of concentrated, high-style reportage. Anyhow, the best claim of responsibility for its American ...”

“... black populism and demagogy in New York and Chicago – which have been more cheaply annexed by Tom Wolfe but which found an outlet also in Mr Sammler’s Planet. In Ravelstein he presents the Jewish experience principally and unexceptionably as one of survival. With a tinge of self-pity, though, he also advances it as something that non-Jews can’t ...”

“... he recalls the disgust he felt at an RIBA conference as the ex-brutalists listened patiently to Tom Wolfe delivering an attack on modernism that was ‘remarkably flimsy, intellectually fraudulent, historically ignorant’. Yet the ‘modern movement’, as an ideology of progress and destroyer of Place, is something he unsurprisingly does not fully ...”

“... of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’ it was – as Tom Dunne argues forcefully in his valuable new study of the ideas of their most famous publicist, Wolfe Tone – because only such a ‘cordial union’ could form an effective counterpoise to ‘the weight of English ...”

“... has also become one of Britain’s most successful cultural exports. It is appropriate that Tom Wolfe, that connoisseur of the cliché, should have registered its arrival in New York. His latest compendium. The Bonfire of the Vanities, includes a hypocritical left-wing English journalist (modelled, it would appear, on Alexander Cockburn) who ...”

“... Pranksters was one of the signature moments of the decade, along with Altamont and Woodstock. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test conferred lifetime notoriety on the pranksters who made the trip.Stone was not one of them. He had already moved back to New York to finish and publish A Hall of Mirrors, which appeared on his thirtieth ...”

“... textbook example of how not to build solidarity’, and, using a term from an article by Tom Wolfe from 1970 about blacks who exploited white guilt to get municipal handouts, accuses the movement of using ‘Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent’.It’s true that the Democrats, to put it mildly, have a grass roots problem. Long before Trump ...”

“... neighbourhood’.In September 1968, Didion and Dunne gave a party at Franklin Avenue for Tom Wolfe, to celebrate the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Janis Joplin arrived and asked for brandy and Benedictine in a water glass. ‘Music people never wanted ordinary drinks,’ Didion noted. ‘They wanted sake, or champagne ...”

“... European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any Tom Wolfe-ish observations from these outings, too concerned with keeping tabs on his own progress to tilt the spotlight elsewhere. One of the best-known passages in Making It is its account of the status update running like a stock ticker through the minds ...”

“... of 1912, towards the ideals of the United Irishmen, the revolutionary organisation founded by Wolfe Tone and a group of Belfast radicals in 1791. Holland, however, is sceptical about the change that has taken place in Loyalist attitudes: some Loyalists, he says, have replaced ‘a sheep-like willingness to follow their middle-class leaders’ with ...”

“... wanted to experience art corporeally, immersively, in the vivid Now. Not only did she hear the tom-tom drums of downtown bohemia beckon, she answered their call, spending rackety hours in lofts, galleries, gay bars and ratty theatres discovering new thresholds, ‘new anatomies’ (to use Hart Crane’s phrase) that were ...”

“... uprising its retrospective approval. The greatest prize was the unity of Ireland and, to borrow Wolfe Tone’s famous phrase, the substitution of ‘the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’. The Proclamation read from the steps of the General Post Office in Sackville Street (now O’Connell ...”

“... than ballast – it represents priceless cargo, and the whole reason for the expedition. That was Tom Wolfe’s contention in his manifesto-essay ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, published in Harper’s in 1989, in which he offered his own novel The Bonfire of the Vanities not just as a triumph of marketing and a shrewd pusher of zeitgeist ...”

“... Connolly, half-lobster, half-lemur, and wearing a kind of grubby Tyrolean jacket, poses between Tom Driberg and Stephen Spender. There is a kind of innocence about it, the pastoralism which only the past can imitate. Spender, looking like a kindly young schoolmaster, clearly had more to do with the solid success of Horizon than his modest account to Michael ...”

“... stronger than that of the mid-Seventies: Benford, Gibson, Crowley, Powers, Shea, Brin, Wolfe, Morrow, Elgin, as opposed to what then seemed to be a Le Guin solo. The reason is unknown. Nevertheless, Science Fiction does seem to be back on course – exploratory, confused, scientific, even post-Gothic (so far with Aldiss), but also ...”