“... of Johnson’s prose remains as unstable as his characters’ minds. In the title story, Bill Whitman seems at first to be the anti-Fuckhead: a successful 62-year-old ad man, educated at Columbia, who worked for the New York Post and spent years making TV commercials ‘just off Madison Avenue’ before moving to San Diego. The story starts by ...”

“... and, more specifically, Americans who have read, or indirectly imbibed, Emerson’s Essays and Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. They have been people more or less intoxicated with the romance of American democracy, with the idea that in America all things are possible, that in the United States there will begin, as promised on the dollar bill, a novus ordo ...”

“... the Moscow trials before World War Two and Henry Wallace for President in 1948. But it was Walt Whitman and not Marx who supplied the epigraph for his next novel, Never Come Morning (1942): ‘I feel I am one of them – I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself – And henceforth I will not deny them – For how can I deny myself?’ The ...”

“... dis-sympathies, &c., – to account for the deep hold this author has taken on the present age,’ Walt Whitman remarked. ‘I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as affecting myself . . . There has been an impalpable something more effective than the palpable.’ The ‘impalpable something’ could not at first have been (and was never ...”

“... the weight of traffic, had been crashing, often for several hours at a time, on a daily basis. Meg Whitman joined as CEO in March 1998. Educated at Princeton and Harvard, she had previously worked for companies including Procter & Gamble (where she famously dedicated herself to working out the optimum diameter for the nozzle of a shampoo bottle), ...”

“... many or most of the figures who recreated modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by the idea that in ...”

“... was leaving the theatre, calling on the new administration ‘to work on behalf of all of us’.) Walt Whitman sang in ‘Mannahatta’ of a city ‘liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient’. Trump wished to be more than accepted in Manhattan: he wanted to be adored, there and only there, and came to despise it in all its diversity and cacophony ...”

“... in livery.) A month later, he wrote to another friend: ‘I travel like a young god.’ He met Walt Whitman (who kissed him); he met Henry James (whom he insulted); he almost met Jesse James (‘The Americans … always take their heroes from the criminal classes’); he had special clothes made (‘The sleeves are to be flowered – if not velvet ...”

“... Afghans.) The US engineers, tall and trim, really looked like ‘freedom’s athletes’, as Walt Whitman called their Civil War forebears, an army of film stars. Other American soldiers were clambering, pistol in one fist, flashlight in the other, into sinister-looking tunnels uncovered by the bulldozers. More tunnels, apparently empty, were being ...”

“... blackboard from which they will all be wiped clean.’ This last wonderful image, which comes from Whitman, suggests that Updike’s words are ghosted by death, and that it is only from that perspective that life seems so full and rich. Updike’s sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust’s sentences in ...”

“... Everyone has recognised the immense drive in American literature, from Melville, Hawthorne and Whitman to the present, to use literature as religious inquiry. Whole academic departments, like the doctoral programme in ‘Religion and Literature’ at my own University of Chicago, have been organised for the serious study of the ways in which literature, or ...”