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“... of adultery in Western literature.’ (Here I was reminded of a Chicago student who once asked Saul Bellow, ‘Can’t you have a novel without adultery?’ to which Bellow replied: ‘Can you have a circus without elephants?’) As Garber nicely sums up the situation, ‘the shortest distance between two points is a triangle.’ And this romantic triangle ...”

“... enemies, coming back to them obsessively. Worst of all the New York crowd was Alfred Kazin – ‘Saul Bellow called him the conductor on the gravy train. Wherever they were passing out money, honour, position, awards – there was Kazin. I didn’t read his memoirs. Well – I did read A Walker in the City, but not the last volume. He’s rewriting his own ...”

“... if contested motif of the elderly sybarite – best known from the fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike – whose declining sexual picaresque is set against historical or social forces which leave the ageing roué flummoxed and rueful. The Escape, or rather its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant Rothdike: all raging ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those ...”

“... the terminal rim, I would hesitate to take bets that resurrection is ruled out. Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title ...”

“... repelled – novelists from Hermann Broch to Milan Kundera and critics from Clement Greenberg to Saul Friedländer, all of whom took it up at periods when technologies of mass culture and mass politics were intensifying: Broch and Greenberg after the dramatic rise of Fascist regimes in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and Kundera and Friedländer as the ...”

“... Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the ...”

“... claim that Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is ...”

“... scantily clad women and salacious cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... there is no profusion either. Dan Jacobson is not a helpless genius of memory like Nabokov or Saul Bellow: his details strike deeply home, but they are St Sebastians, martyrs to detail. Bellow, characterising Herzog, also delineates himself: ‘Almost certainly, Nachman ran away from the power of his old friend’s memory. Herzog persecuted everyone with ...”

“... originally recorded’, during the phonograph boom of the Twenties. While the pioneer folklorist John Lomax remained suspicious of the new technology which made such preservation possible, his younger colleague, the composer-musicologist, Charles Seeger, took a less purist – and more activist – view of what folk music might be. Radicalised by the ...”

“... infant pupils were failing to progress in reading because the imported books (usually Janet and John) bore no relation to their lives and emotions. She discovered that for each child there were certain key words related to their day-to-day lives and to their feelings. Find one of his or her key words and the child who had taken three weeks to learn and ...”

“... remain so. Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given ...”