“... us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists expand ...”

“... James Purdy​ ’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey supernaturally, materialising by Sitwell’s bedside when she woke from a nap ...”

“... tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I stayed in my cabin most of the time,’ Bowles ...”

“... Ned, an American whose voice whines like a gnat, manipulates the stupid but beautiful bisexual James in The Sweet Dove Died. Inviting his rival, the fastidious Leonora, to view the ‘exceptionally wide double bed covered in mauve velvet’ in his flat, he enjoys telling her that ‘comfort isn’t all I go for.’Spinsters, clerics, homosexuals – and ...”

“... a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his ...”

“... Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret infatuation must feel when the boy she’s been mooning over asks her for a date.’ It was a compact beehive of brain industry and Podhoretz ...”

“... chose to present it, as the pathetic picture of two orphans of the storm, victimised by the hound Baldwin, the main facts on which it is based are widely known and the subject of little dispute. The authors, one of whom wrote the Duke’s autobiography and helped the Duchess with hers, can add much detail but little new basic knowledge, even though Freda ...”

“... of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on ...”

“... that we cannot always expect its intellectuals to approach us with the colonial cringe of Henry James or T.S. Eliot. Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And his ...”

“... primarily as a character in someone else’s story. Ever since Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, in which she appears as a lonely spinster with an ear trumpet and an unrequited passion for her fellow novelist, speculation over the closeness of her friendship with James and the motives for her suicide has dominated ...”

“... last, black intellectual to mentor Simone, who now found herself in the company of the likes of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, who was particularly influential in raising her political conscience. Part of Simone’s momentum was down to her talent, and part to the burly macho former police detective, Andrew Stroud, who took over managing her ...”

“... I didn’t like to read ’em, particularly.’ Of his high-school contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow students subscriptions to the New York Times.At seventeen he found a job at ...”

“... was welcome in offices still electric with the soul of Ernest Hemingway, the flaming passion of James Baldwin, and the force and animation of Mailer, Wolfe, Vidal, Buckley, Burroughs and Genet. The editors who followed Hayes, men like Byron Dobell and the late Don Erickson, carried on the tradition, ensuring that each new generation of editors ...”

“... possible for immigrant Europeans – first the Irish and then the Jews – to pass. Rogin quotes James Baldwin: ‘No one was white before he/she came to America.’ It is customary to derive American movies from the low comedy and ethnic knockabout of late 19th-century vaudeville, as well as the mishmash of spectacular attractions that characterised ...”

“... a profit. He was the public face of an ideological shift which saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan, acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for ...”