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“... were the regular reviews Kingsley Amis used to write for him at the New Statesman – ‘never a mark on them’.Kingsley Amis might not be a writer people immediately think of in relation to Karl, but Karl’s reach across the literary culture of Britain was so great that it would be harder to think of writers whom he didn’t work with than ones whom he ...”

“... the Castro) and the dykes and queers turn out to be pretty patriotic. (We’re all proud of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped crash Flight 93 into the ground.) Every few hours I talk to my lover Blakey in Chicago. She lives in a big high-rise off Lake Shore Drive – we don’t know when we’ll see each other again. At ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie violence ...”

“... novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail circuit and into print. The soundbites had plausibility because ...”

“... from an outer borough. New Yorkers hardly have a bias against aspiring newcomers. The musical Hamilton exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’ President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving ...”