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“... was exactly the mot juste ... or was it? I was reminded of a short story by Anatole France, which made a deep impression on me when I read it a long time ago. It’s about a woman who invents a fictitious character called Putois as an excuse for getting out of any boring social engagement, and this figment of her imagination gradually assumes a ...”

“... a complicated bastard, which is why he needed so many alter egos (Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol) to thrash himself out.Any efforts at fine-shading Roth’s behaviour with women into a three-dimensional portrait runs into the problem of his two marriages. If any man had been shaped by nature and disposition to be a permanent bachelor, a ...”

“... at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie ...”

“... Conroy and Miss Ivors in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. When Gabriel tells Miss Ivors that he goes to France and Belgium ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages’, she replies: ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish?’ To which Gabriel replies: ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ In A ...”

“... back to Waterloo and do two more. No. That would ‘take it out of her’. ‘I had one taken in France once when I was 21 or 22. Had to go into the next village for it. I came out cross-eyed. I saw someone else’s photo on their bus pass and she’d come out looking like a nigger. You don’t want to come out like a nigger if you can help it, do ...”

“... slowly become clear. The revelations of the Grenfell inquiry, so plainly and painfully recorded by Peter Apps of Inside Housing, are echoed not just in thousands of other cases of ghastly what-might-have-beens but in the lackadaisical, flailing process of undoing what was done.* The inquiry revealed a tangle of deniability masquerading as responsibility, with ...”

“... in Europe. Furman’s concern was framed very differently. Why, he asked at the outset, had France known four revolutions since the 18th century, and some 15 constitutions, and the United States just one of each? Could religion have something to do with it? Bourgeois society in America, he argued, had from the beginning combined exceptional dynamism ...”

“... necessarily defective consciousness, or giving it a shape like an hourglass, like James or Anatole France. Where, if not to James, could Forster have looked for a serviceable theory of fiction? Certainly not to Lubbock. In fact there was not, at the time, much of that kind of thing to be had. Since then, the situation has altered amazingly: 1969 is given as ...”

“... in August 1914, he volunteered, while still 17. His regiment was the Royal Artillery. He was in France and Flanders for four years, and was then invalided out suffering from trench feet.Enlisting in the Army may have had a special significance for him in that it related to an element in his heritage of which he was as proud as he was of its rabbinical ...”