“... time, at the Savoy Hotel, where he gave me the end of a bottle of whisky and wanted to figure out Fitzgerald. ‘We’re talking about the art of fiction in this interview, OK?’ I said during the Michael Shay dinner. ‘So I’m not going to be asking you anything about stabbing your wife.’ This was a big concession, journalistically, since I’d met ...”

“... solidity, but the past wasn’t solid while it was happening. Another tradition, of which Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is the assuming apotheosis, sees research not as a chore or an obsession but as a sap that can be made to flow through every capillary of the text. Thomson’s prose has a striking lightness of texture, even when he produces one of ...”

“... Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th ...”

“... Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was in my Enid Blyton period. I sucked and sucked at books for the juice of ...”

“... spirit of sophisticated cultural malaise and psychosexual malfunction so palpable in Hemingway or Fitzgerald. As Acocella puts it, Cather went on giving readers ‘stories about noble-minded people living in small towns, often in the past. She did not examine her characters’ stream of consciousness or, for the most part, their sex lives. She examined their ...”

“... in life was boring, transitory, confused, insipid, banal. Dickens and Thackeray and Proust, Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Powell – they are all packed with lunches and dinners, balls and parties, which one would much rather not have been at, but which art has contrived to make glorious for us by proxy. Unfair to compare diaries with ...”

“... Raditzer, which appeared in 1961, is an existentialist melodrama written under the spell of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and drawing from autobiographical material, in this case Matthiessen’s stint in the navy. The son of a prosperous lawyer is caught between his parents’ expectations and his ambitions to become a painter. He ships out to Hawaii at the ...”

“... system have a ‘systematically adverse impact on ethnic minorities’ (as it is put by Marion Fitzgerald in her research study done for the Commission). The main difficulty, as I see it, is that, as Professor Robert Reiner pointed out a decade ago, young Afro-Caribbean males are likely to become disproportionately ...”

“... Texans to be president (if only). In 1972 he supported McGovern (but died before the election). Robert Penn Warren, reviewing Patriotic Gore for Commentary, was surely right to say that what most moved Wilson was ‘some courageous manifestation of the old virtues’, regardless of political affiliation. Once when he was asked why he was so anti-British, he ...”

“... The week​ before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... US Amazon bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to do with what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘foul dust’ than with ideas or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid ...”

“... could not have been written without the formal breakthrough it represented. But Lermontov and Fitzgerald were equally, in certain respects perhaps more, important as inspirations. Powell was no one’s epigone. When he is set beside Proust, it is not the connections between them, but the disparities in reception that are most significant. The literature ...”

“... now open for a more experienced hand. Hermione Lee, then at work on her biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, was invited to be Miller’s successor, but had to decline, sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and ...”

“... of a tousle-haired, clean-limbed and smiling John Spahr, looking like a tragic hero out of Scott Fitzgerald. Why does one of the very best scholastic rowers in the United States go to school in North Philadelphia – when he lives in Cherry Hill? ‘It was just word of mouth,’ said John Spahr, who won the Junior National Singles championship last ...”