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“... Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend ...”

“... to a wild, romantic longing in Powell’s otherwise rather tight-buttoned upbringing. His father, Philip, was from Melton Mowbray, and his mother, Maud, from Lincolnshire. Philip Powell was commissioned into the Welch Regiment, though ‘not on account of the Powells’ Welsh extraction’, as Powell admits in the first ...”

“... to – nothing to compare with the groundwork available to writers such as Bellow, Malamud and Philip Roth in the United States. Dan Jacohson’s exploration of Jewish themes is largely done outside the South African context; Rose Zwi’s portrayal of a Johannesburg Jewish community hermetically seals it off from its surroundings, and lacquers it over ...”

“... self, the auto at the heart of autobiography, when compared to the portraiture methods of, say, Philip Roth (in his Zuckerman novels) or Annie Ernaux, who, in The Years, describes the life of a woman of her generation as if she were a concave mirror, able to capture, from the very edge of vision, the lives of all her contemporaries thronging round ...”

“... small individual lives’ rather than ‘taking a broad canvas of society’ like Don DeLillo or Philip Roth. Well, Winters retorts: way back in high school we learned that the major themes of literature were birth, love, understanding, work, loneliness, connection and death. We believed that the readers of novels were themselves ‘small individual ...”

“... as he cheerfully says, is ‘self-glorifying pantaloon’: ‘At the same table as David Hockney, Philip Roth, Harold Pinter and Sir Isaiah Berlin, it was flattering to be treated like one of the boys.’ We sometimes meet the man who’s concerned to share unflattering truths about himself – admissions, mostly, of getting over-accustomed to having ...”

“... a description of our vulnerability. Radji records only one person who refused his hospitality: Philip Roth (though there were others). The title is apt. Radji was indeed ‘in the service’ of a narcissistic and obsessive monarch, a man incapable of accepting criticism, or even good advice; a man who solicited flattery, liable to blow up over the ...”

“... a passing thought of suicide. However, there is no outcry, nothing like the passionate railing of Philip Roth in his terrifying new novel, Everyman. The old lady is like the author, formidably intelligent and bien élevée, and she has, in her usual admirable way, written what it would be slightly vulgar to call a novel or an autobiography or an exercise ...”

“... minute in an actual Texas. But again, the opposite of cartoonishness is not the actual. Ever since Philip Roth made his famous statement about how American reality out-fictionalises the fictional, the debate has not been about verisimilitude. Or rather, since cartoonishness characterises a great deal of American reality, it is fair to say that ...”

“... to the conventional 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 ...”

“... and secrets? Between secrets and waste? DeLillo’s novel, like recent novels by John Updike and Philip Roth with more openly ironic and regretful titles (The Lilies of the Field , American Pastoral ), confronts and re-creates American history. The very word ‘history’ keeps flashing through Underworld as if it were an omen or a mantra. The ...”

“... The last, I guess. The form of The Great Pretender is Portnoyesque autobiography. Atlas brings to Roth’s now rather hackneyed technique a hurried absentmindedness in which logical links are dropped and every sentence jacknifes irrelevantly from its predecessor. Take, for example, the following itinerary of brains to breasts via the Partisan Review: Brains ...”

“... For a long time, Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of parts scavenged from discarded washing-machines ...”

“... practises, seems to occupy a smaller and smaller cultural space. Apart from the superstars like Philip Roth or Toni Morrison, literary writers in America are accorded a social status roughly equivalent to that of artisanal potters producing, like them, lovely, unnecessary work that hardly anyone cares enough about to want. (That’s the kind of writer ...”

“... nor does it give any depth or power to their portrayal as fucked-up rich kids, in the way, say, Philip Roth does in American Pastoral. Second, and far more troublingly, why does Dial then go on the run with Che, sacrificing her job and her life, and his too? When Susan blows herself up, why doesn’t Dial just return the child to his ...”