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“... continuum. Updike’s Self-Consciousness is well up at the art-over-life end of the spectrum; Philip Roth’s record-straightening and strangely flat The Facts is, perhaps surprisingly, of the other type (and his intensely focused Patrimony is somewhere in the middle). Kingsley Amis’s riotous Memoirs are lifelike, too much so for some. Terence Kilmartin ...”

“... with love by his mother and starved of it by his father, and had been mocked as ‘Reggie-No-Dick’ aged sixteen after he’d failed to perform in his first sexual encounter, so he was in effect taking revenge on the whole female sex each time he enticed women into his house on the pretext of helping them to abort their babies, and then ...”

“... and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was looking for a john and who do I see but Philip Roth. “Hey, Philip, what you doin’ here?” “Oh, I had to pee,” Roth said. “Happens to me all the time,” I said. “You just have to pee.” The previous week I went to see my daughter in Brooklyn and I ...”

“... Snyder, poet, bioregionalist, teacher. Having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, he is the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and ...”

“... keeping a lively four-year-old in place.’ This wasn’t her first stint as an artist’s model. Philip Pearlstein had painted Nochlin and her then husband Dick Pommer in 1968. A photograph of Nochlin standing in front of the painting twenty years later shows one of the best interpreters of realist painting acknowledging ...”

“... 1994, when the DNA from a piece of Anna’s intestine was compared with samples taken from Prince Philip and the Romanovs on the one hand, and with a blood sample from a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska on the other. The test proved emphatically that Anna was related to the Schanzkowskis and not to the Romanovs. This of course did not prevent her supporters ...”

“... to recognise ‘Red China’ – except who wants to be called a Commie sympathiser not just by Dick Nixon but by Bobby Kennedy?) Yet at least, on his way out, Johnson did leave behind a time-bomb that could and should have destroyed Richard Nixon.Whenever Nixon sought to justify an illegality or an atrocity, he did so by envious and bitter reference to the ...”

“... up ... People might dance a little ... A few games would begin ... When one day their friend Dick Wyndham slipped off a pogo-stick and broke his jaw, ‘there was a queer funeral cortege down to the river – to throw in not Dick Wyndham, but the pogo-stick.’ There were two tennis courts where mixed doubles were ...”

“... response to congratulation on a heartfelt speech of denunciation: ‘And what’s so wonderful, Dick, is that we are morally in the right.’ Nor would this have come as any surprise to Crossman, who had perceptively recorded a year previously these precise objections to Gaitskell: ‘most serious of all, someone who takes a moralising and reactionary ...”

“... to be sexually gratified by the sight of a safety pin. He also speculates that the novelist Philip K. Dick’s 8000-page late work, Exegesis, was inaugurated by a temporal lobe seizure that led Dick to believe with certainty that he had become a first-century Christian fleeing Roman ...”

“... which he grooms like a show-cat. He prizes his guilt because it’s guilt with a pedigree. Philip Rahv famously divided American authors into redskins and palefaces. Redskins are bearded bards and pagan guzzlers of experience (Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, the Beats, and that honorary American, D.H. Lawrence); palefaces, the tightly-buttoned patrician ...”

“... of Retribution’ can vie for dramatic horror with the images from Abu Ghraib, and so the old Philip Roth line – that American reality will outstrip anything the novelist may imagine – is borne out once more. As a result, this whole section seems not just pallid and unadventurous but insufficiently novelistic. It brings a kind of ‘news’ that is ...”

“... context the names that regularly provoke newspaper articles – Moon Unit Zappa, Zowie Bowie (a.k.a. Duncan Jones), Trig and Track Palin, Rocket, Racer, Rebel and Rogue Rodriguez, Number 16 Bus Shelter and Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii (known to her friends as ‘K’) – may seem a little less provocative. Michael Jackson did not, after all, actually ...”

“... to get the political editors of the Sun, the Observer, the Times and the Sunday Times sacked. Dick Crossman reported that ‘Harold spent ten minutes at cabinet, complaining about a disc jockey, I think they’re called.’ Wilson did manage to persuade the director-general of the BBC, the normally robust Hugh Carleton Greene, to postpone that week’s ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”