“... He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The ...”

“... say, in a moment of leisure from aping the worst excesses of the chauvinistic sexist male: Please, Mary. Homophobia is resilient as a system because of a quirk of its chronology: even those individuals who will suffer in time profit from it before it works against them. Any child, any male child at least, has disparaged gay people, or at least been a party to ...”

“... into the 1950s. It’s a bit of a girl thing: Steffens is also Norine’s favourite writer in Mary McCarthy’s The Group. With this crucial difference: Monroe was not a Vassar girl. Unlike Norine, she had no education. She educated – she never stopped educating – herself. ‘Of the cruelties directed at this young woman,’ Diana Trilling wrote ...”

“... elation created by the new generation in Dublin which Roy Foster describes in Vivid Faces (2015). Mary Colum, for example, later wrote about her time teaching at Pearse’s school:The teaching staff was young, and we seemed, all of us, to be travelling on the same road … Looking back, it seems incredible that so many young people were eager to devote their ...”