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“... agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, his great friend, Julian Barnes; the near-death of his mentor Saul Bellow; the discovery that his maternal cousin Lucy Partington, missing since she disappeared without trace in December 1973, had been one of the victims of Fred West. To contemplate this sequence is to see how it might well have needed expression in ...”

“... It isn’t hard to see how the idea of signature applies to Nabokov; or, for that matter, to Bellow, Updike, Compton-Burnett, Iain Sinclair, Cormac McCarthy, Roth, Ozick, etc. (Lurking in Wood’s idea is the implication that modern critics and readers make too much of signature.) Nabokov’s signature is often both what initially attracts readers to his ...”

“... footnoted Experience, there is a relatively brief note on Amis’s almost filial relation to Saul Bellow, in which, having clarified that although he was not Bellow’s son he was Bellow’s ideal reader, Amis added: ‘I am not my father’s ideal reader, however. His ideal ...”

“... Moments of Reprieve (the stories are only a few pages long) is exemplary. Everything in them, as Saul Bellow has said, is essential. In their thrift, they draw attention to an aspect of the world they describe, where the only contact with the outside world is a scrap of newspaper salvaged furtively from a rubbish bin; where a torn piece of cement bag ...”

“... Jews – there must be an element of strangeness and exoticism in his work. You could call Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Jewish writers, but they are also American writers. Singer never attempts to present a Gentile sensibility; in this whole volume there are hardly any Gentiles and only one with more than a walk-on part. The stories ...”

“... success. Stead was to have from that time on powerful literary support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all good, but it had ...”

“... which the aspiring journalist places himself (or herself) alongside the product. Martin Amis got Saul Bellow and Madonna’s anteroom, while Penman grafted the standard profiles with which all the amphetamine gunslingers proved their manhood: Jim Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton and Robin Cook (a.k.a. Derek Raymond). Penman was the writer who isn’t in the ...”

“... of Italo Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus’ – The Arcades Project ...”

“... As Saul Bellow once wrote, we have a problem talking about Mozart. It is the fear of having to contemplate transcendence and being embarrassed by something for which we have no vocabulary. To make matters worse, Mozart composed sublime music but, in contrast to Beethoven, had the wrong personality for sublimity, being prone to clowning and lavatory humour ...”

“... and ‘far easier to play than they sound’. The work is easily taken for granted, as it was by Saul Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back. Provoked by this, Keller wrote a whole book on the concerto, and wrote acutely about the composer elsewhere. He gets no mention from Todd, but then his book remains mysteriously unpublished. Mendelssohn’s liking for ...”

“... matter how careless you are or how skilled at forgetting, or even if you’re a writer as good as Saul Bellow. Though you do have to teach yourself not to cart it all around inside until you rot or explode. (The Existence Period, let me say, is made special for this sort of adjusting.) Bellow, the likely model for ...”

“... and the Nation in their heroic periods (when he also made his most surprising friend – Saul Bellow), and would be better off protesting not at all about such a cheap and politicised slander.The finest and most revealing passages in Palimpsest, those which best synthesise the public and the personal, are the ones which treat of the Kennedy ...”

“... and foolishness, two figures escaped. One was Cheever’s younger son, Federico, and the other was Saul Bellow. Cheever seems to have liked both of them; or both of them had worked out a way to evade the daily spite he directed at all others, including his editor at the New Yorker, William Maxwell, who, he noted, bored him stiff. Federico got on with his ...”

“... is. And Alter’s version allows one to make new connections with biblical-sounding texts. Saul Bellow, who grew up reading the Hebrew Bible, and whose English was profoundly influenced by both the Tanakh and the King James Version, was very fond of that objectless verb ‘knew’. Tommy Wilhelm, the hero of Seize the Day, is haplessly surrounded ...”