“... he would be waiting at a restaurant on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, easy to spot with his black hair and red and black checked shirt. Kerouac had a winning sweetness and an obsession with writing that no girl working half-secretly on her first novel could resist. She was bowled over by his physical beauty, and ...”

“... inscribed on his coffin. ‘If there is any single thing that explains either of us,’ he said to Eugene O’Neill, ‘it’s that we’re Irish.’ Ford’s great discovery was that many of the citizen soldiers who fought in the American Revolution were Irish immigrants: a finding, McBride writes, that ‘roused in him a vital connection to American history ...”

“... who saw it as a ‘country of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this ...”

“... Academy’s summer exhibitions in order to see ‘those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black velvet waistcoats, with their fists doubled up on round tables, or marble slabs … and all the ladies who are playing with little parasols, or little dogs, or little children’, in the words of Miss La Creevy in his novel. In 1839 he was able to admire ...”

“... the slow changes in the way men were treated in Irish writing. In the 1960s, playwrights such as Eugene McCabe in King of the Castle, Tom Murphy in A Whistle in the Dark and John B. Keane in The Field began to work on the mixture of violence and impotence in the Irish male psyche. And in the 1970s John McGahern published two novels, The Leavetaking and The ...”

“... African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa Library, now bitterly inveighing against the ...”

“... with jockeys on the front porch. It’s amusing to learn that her charming, conniving father, Eugene, a plumber who enjoyed baseball and jazz, once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout ...”

“... United States Public Health Service appropriated to represent syphilis to the largely illiterate black men who were about to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the abolitionist response to St Paul’s pronouncement that the whole human ...”

“... as his wife tries on her old evening dresses: ‘She tried them on, one after another – the black taffeta with the bouffant skirt, the pale sea-green silk with matching silk fringe – all her favourite dresses that she had been too fond of to take to a thrift shop, and that had been languishing on the top shelf of her closet’ Objects in the house ...”

“... in Lassie, Karolyn Grimes, who played Jimmy Stewart’s daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life, and Eugene Mazzola, who was in The Ten Commandments. I assured Miss Moore I could do just as well as any of those creeps in any picture she could get me into. She told me I should gain experience in the West End and then call her. Thus my fascination with London. I ...”

“... of my father’s. Dad had invested in Muntz TV, the first streamlined seventeen-tube low-cost black and white model, which Muntz began selling in 1947. In 1950 my sister, Jane, and I visited Muntz at home in Beverly Hills and encountered for the only time in our lives a TV at the bottom of a swimming pool. The controls were at the pool’s edge. You chose ...”

“... the attention of OSS. He managed its accounts in Algiers, making enough money for himself on the black market to buy a well-provisioned wine cellar and a luxury sedan. When American forces disembarked in the South of France in August 1944 and advanced up the Rhone Valley, OSS sent him to Alsace to interrogate and suborn German prisoners of war. Of the thirty ...”

“... to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing ...”

“... without ever raising the topic of race myself. Roberto’s case rested on his years dating a black woman and then living with a Muslim woman before at last marrying an Italian. He was a big fan of The Apprentice, and said he was voting for its former host because we need a president with ‘rough edges’. ‘We need a guy with big ones right here,’ he ...”

“... egos, abound and contrast. There is a character called Coetzee in each section, and a narrator, Eugene Dawn, in the first section who shares many of the author’s traits, notably a meticulous tidiness with his papers and the feeling that he’s only really happy among books; both qualities seem allied to the novel’s strategy of metafictional ...”