“... at all between knowing you want to pee and then just peeing. I was at Plimpton’s funeral in St John the Divine not long ago, and they sat me near the front, you know. Suddenly, I had to go. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it all the way down the aisle so I spotted a little side door and I got the canes and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was ...”

“... grisly slides of My Lai as the climax of his illustrated talk to the Cleveland Jaycees Club. John Updike has called Vietnam America’s least memorialised war. In its own way, this often ugly story is a handsome tribute to the Vietnam War of men like Thompson, Ridenhour and Peers, to the resurgent spirit of the Vietnamese, and indeed to its ...”

“... grandson Matthew Yorke, and rounded off with a touching if too brief memoir by Sebastian Yorke. John Updike contributes a gracefully enthusiastic introduction. For Green, writing fiction was so demanding – partly because he could only work at it in the evenings and at weekends, and partly because he rewrote so much – that it’s not surprising that ...”

“... three-legged-race quality in consequence), but slowing the tempo has been an effective device for John Updike in The Witches of Eastwick and Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black. Both of these writers compensate with a stronger evocation of atmosphere, a finer descriptive grain, while Ishiguro opts for deceleration without a thickening of texture. There’s ...”

“... unco-operative. Cereno and Bartleby, by contrast, confound their challengers with what John Updike called ‘a defensive catatonia’. But while ‘Bartleby’ unmasks the agonies of alienated labour and points to unsettling continuities between Northern and Southern workforces, ‘Benito Cereno’ never becomes a full-throated assault on ...”

“... for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang. ‘This shy goddess,’ John Updike once wrote, ‘who avoids parties and live audiences, fascinates us with the amount of space we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next ...”

“... or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”’ ‘Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts ...”

“... cited as precedent the game of Consequences, which the Surrealists used to play. In 1997, John Updike began a composite fiction on the Internet, and Amazon.com bankrolled a contest to continue it, with daily winners awarded a thousand dollars and a Grand Prize of $100,000 at the end for one of the contestants chosen by lottery. Harper’s Bazar ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... the gang and persuaded them to disperse. He followed up this act of personal bravery with what John Updike called ‘Franklin’s fiercest and most eloquent pamphlet’, A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. During the Revolutionary Wars, the anti-slavery cause was put on hold. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin decided ...”

“... firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal. John Berryman, Dream Song When we first meet him in The Sportswriter (1986), Frank Bascombe is 38 and trying to fend off the ‘dreaminess’ that has afflicted him since Ralph, his first son, died of Reye’s syndrome four years earlier. Now divorced from ...”

“... at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF advertises consumer goods like personal robots and flying cars. It valorises space travel that culminates in successful (if difficult) contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a ...”

“... morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where ...”

“... of myself as a mental self, my feeling is that I am continually new. In his autobiography, John Updike writes: ‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life ... that I am just beginning.’ This seems exactly right. The experience of the ‘I’ as in some sense new each time is (I suggest) fundamental and universally available, although it is ...”