“... a figurehead and introduce a thoroughgoing parliamentary system. On the way, the essays discuss Edmund Wilson, the Oz books, V.S. Pritchett, Hollywood, Theodore Roosevelt and various other topics and people. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of what Vidal is up to is to look at the title essay. This is a piece in heroic bad taste, full of swash and ...”

“... respect the manuscript seems merely pious, pretty aimless otherwise. The same goes for the title. Edmund Wilson called the book – Fitzgerald had completed 17 out of 30 projected chapters – The Last Tycoon, and Graham later said she thought Fitzgerald would have preferred this. At the time he was playing with the idea of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A ...”

“... imagine. Reflections like these may tempt us to join the cringers; to side with Nabokov against Edmund Wilson, for example. The two men were still some seven years from their serious falling out over Pushkin, but they strongly disagreed here already. Nabokov thought Doctor Zhivago was ‘dreary conventional stuff’, and ...”

“... Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great personal charm, unable to register the ...”

“... She was no Jezebel. Even less was she Estella, the shallow, vindictive tormentor of men that Edmund Wilson popularised. She was the object of a domineering lover and lived in a moralistic age, but refused to be destroyed by either. Mrs Oliphant was also a survivor but in a more literal and wretched sense than Nelly Ternan. Oliphant outlived everyone ...”

“... concerned with the economic impact of slavery, don’t live up to Stowe’s comments, though Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, was too harsh in claiming that ‘Olmsted, in the literary sense, was a very bad writer.’ But he certainly wrote better about things like trees, rocks and streams than he did about economics. In the late summer of 1857 ...”

“... New York, as he did Berlin. His autobiography had appeared two years before, celebrated by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, who compared Grosz’s new Cape Cod paintings to Dürer. German museums were starting to reacquire his older works. But Grosz was already in the midst of his slow American suicide. ‘I’m a poor wretch, that’s the simple ...”

“... there soon went a much more romantic sense of the price to be paid. To every bow its wound, as Edmund Wilson, who much admired Jarrell, was to insist, and certainly the theory could be said to be borne out in the lives and work of the younger generation, the one which included Jarrell, Berryman and Lowell. In the life of Marianne Moore bows and wounds ...”

“... popular, though there was Lloyd Douglas’s bestselling The Robe, which amazed the experienced Edmund Wilson by its sheer dullness. This example of the genre, though revived after almost forty years, will probably share the fate of the rest. In the end there seems to be something wrong with the idea of the bio-novel. Its non-fictional base is already ...”

“... in the response to Auden’s books as they appeared, duly welcomed by a line of critics from Edmund Wilson to John Updike. There were exceptions. Joseph Warren Beach thought Auden’s textual shenanigans were treachery, Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s wit and elegance quite enjoyable up to a point – or rather, up to the point of their becoming ...”

“... novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and including Woolf, Edmund Wilson (‘No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was’) and V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which he is now published and read, and the ...”

“... is a logical contradiction, produced by too much treacle in the blood. Duty is a different matter. Edmund Wilson considered Nabokov cruel, too. But if we reconsider that hemmed-in car at the end of Lolita, we can see the fidelity of Nabokov’s record. Experience will never endorse the simplified democracy of emotion desired by Enright, or the ...”

“... In​ 1930, Edmund Wilson went on the road for the New Republic. He covered striking textile workers in Massachusetts, militant miners in West Virginia and suicides in industrial cities. His pieces concerned social conflict and ruined lives, but Wilson had a deep interest in the new industrial world that was still taking shape ...”

“... both Freudian and contemporary, by the space it opened up for his own long struggle with reality. Edmund Wilson catches the mood in a passage from The Shores of Light: One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom . . . a new sense of power to find ourselves ...”

“... Borodin, and Malraux would say no less to interviewers and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like ...”