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“... preserve of the Church, it only aped what humans do best of all, and have the most fun with. Sex, Woody Allen said in happier times, is only dirty if you do it right. Conversely, disgust gets you off the hook of love if you nurture it as Swift did, both tormenting and releasing himself with the thought: ‘Nor wonder how I lost my ...”

“... most part, write prose: she writes speech. She is the daughter of Groucho Marx and the mother of Woody Allen. You can pick it up from the far side of the Atlantic: ‘She says I called Mrs Z. a grizzly bear a few times. It’s my wife, no? ... ’ ‘She died in front of the television set. She didn’t miss a trick ... ’ ‘She’s a nice-looking ...”

“... something worth reporting, we’d be long gone before the stars got the news. There are those of a Woody Allen temperament who find this revised worldview not bearable. Angst and dread overcome them; they languish in existential loneliness. Or at least they tell me that they do. I guess I sympathise, though it’s not a mood I find it easy to get into. If ...”

“... abandoned, and we can enjoy Flora’s company because we’re not married to her and because, as Woody Allen would say, she’s only fictional. Into this mix Nabokov clearly planned to insert a novel written by the narrator of the opening pages – that is, a person who knows (and sleeps with) Flora and turns her into a thinly disguised character called ...”

“... getting his hands dirty.’ Corso is Sam Spade among the bibliophiles, a character out of Woody Allen as well as out of Eco. He is a pastiche of a pastiche, but he still fails to understand, until the end, that some coincidences are just coincidences, that both chance and conspiracy are features of the world we imagine we know. ‘I thought you ...”

“... has overtaken the comic writer,’ he complained. In fact our greatest living comic, Woody Allen, derives directly from Perelman’s intellectual schlemiel routine. Perelman ended up feeling rather out of touch with the times. After the death of Laura he precipitately sold the farm in Pennsylvania and tried to settle down in London. All his ...”

“... are bandits, shamans, revolutionaries all adrift in a Siberia borrowed, in about equal doses, from Woody Allen and Dostoevsky. The Tsar, a bandit says, weeping – ‘the Little Father of All the Russians ... is the friend of simple truth and doesn’t know the half of what his officials get up to on the side.’ Fevvers thinks: ‘Nobility of spirit hand ...”

“... of the heart. I noticed, too, that I am out of napkins. Will it never stop?’ That’s Woody Allen: he is joking. You can imagine what it’s like when Fowles is diagnosed with amoebic dysentery: ‘Not altogether an ill wind; so many depths would have been unplumbed.’ It is never a good idea to live next door to a writer, because they tend ...”

“... of Duck Soup; she dances around him singing the nonsense song from Modern Times. They could be Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, or, from an earlier era, the Little Tramp and the Kid, alone together against a hostile world. Ezra most obviously correlates with Roth when we discover he is also a decorated veteran of the sexual ...”

“... knowingly, while knowing nothing much, and thinking even less. Ironic chic has been with us since Woody Allen set us all smiling smugly in the cinemas, but lately it has got out of hand. TV’s Eurotrash gives permission to wallow in silicon-enhanced breasts and cultural impoverishment with an ironically raised Gallic eyebrow. Chat-show host and DJ Chris ...”

“... of my attention may have been heightened by the fact that sitting in the row behind me were Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn; I couldn’t help watching them watch, in my head at least, and therefore – as it felt – watching more, and more closely, myself. At the interval, naturally, I was as curious as any stargazer to see where ...”

“... were really lecherous they would no longer be funny. (Adam Gopnik was making such a point about Woody Allen a couple of months ago in the New Yorker.) Being parodies of lechery, they enact claims on the part of each human creature (‘All God’s chillun’ is how they name them in A Day at the Races) to be loved, for no reason. Harpo would not know ...”

“... making it hard even for her to feel settled within any single identity.’ In his book on Woody Allen (1990) he expands: ‘Many observers have been content to settle on the fairly contemptuous belief that movie stars “play themselves” – as if playing oneself were easy, given the complex, contradictory material at hand and the problem of ...”

“... can’t have written this novel, or any novel we could read, because he’s only fictional, as Woody Allen would say, and fictional authors have even more trouble finding real publishers than flesh-and-bones authors do. But then imagining the Master has written the novel fictionalises us, pulls us into his world rather than puts him in ours. In this ...”

“... much part of life. If you need complete secularism, it’s not Wittgenstein you should go to but Woody Allen: ‘I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it ...”