“... exasperating in itself. Dunthorne realises it isn’t a work of record but a chunk of tendentious self-representation. The dead are no less cunning than the living. ‘If the narrator of the memoir was the ideal part of himself,’ Dunthorne asks, ‘then where had Siegfried hidden the rest?’Unforthcoming about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere ...”

“... about its anxieties, distortions and deformations, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, which until the mid-1980s every trade unionist, Labour Party member and left-leaning student in Britain could safely be said to have read, or at least heard of. Then in 1984 everyone put it down and picked up Money. For the benefit of anyone too ...”

“... Most novels, if they come off, are orgies of self-congratulation, shared between the writer and the reader, who unconsciously understand both what is going on and what is needed. To enjoy a novel is by extension to enjoy oneself, and novelists in their various ways accommodate the process. Although the rules are always changing, both sides know the game ...”

“... of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real ...”

“... She returned the following year and formed close friendships with two of the other residents, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell’s anti-communist crusade soon caused a ruckus (he accused another writer, Agnes Smedley, of being a Russian spy and the colony’s director, Elizabeth Ames, of colluding with her). When he cut his stay at Yaddo ...”

“... yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down ...”

“... Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan isn’t straightforward. He isn’t anything so crude as a tribute act: he performs his own ...”

“... company he wanted to join (the straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the ...”

“... Alderman is a member of the community he describes and his book can be read as a collective self-portrait – presented from an inward-looking, religiously Orthodox, politically conservative and rather philistine perspective. Modern British Jewry has little to say about anti-semitism or assimilation, both of which, without distinction, it sees merely as ...”

“... it contains some lively and interesting passages, it has to be treated with caution as largely self-serving. All this is changing on direct orders from the top. About a year ago, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gromyko’s successor at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, assembled his entire staff to listen to a remarkable in-house address, lasting several hours, in which ...”

“... gravy train student politics is. The Kinnockian Labour Party, they argue, became in effect self-recruiting: a Party dominated by professional politicians chose its allies and successors from organisations dominated by budding professional politicians. It is a pity Heffernan and Marqusee do not acknowledge what a long and distinguished pedigree this ...”

“... these novels so brilliantly funny – a lucid and ironic awareness of how pointless and manic and self-centred this talk is. Talk is a kind of doomed buffoonery, wearing funny clothes and taking tumbles because it doesn’t know how to get another job, or if there is another job, anywhere. The books are crowded with voices and short on punctuation, but are ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... unfunny) courtroom jests recall the world of Albion’s Fatal Tree, with its smug, self-interested judges and their crushing response to property crime. Wit usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate malefactor, mirroring the imbalance of power in practice. Even the rare exceptions give the punchline to power. In the 1721 edition ...”

“... humiliators rather than the humiliated, to ‘convert trauma into triumph’ (in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s terms), to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control, the trauma of being a child into the false triumph of being an adult. The child as abject supplicant becomes the adult as arrogant sadist. In other words ...”