“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”

“... a television series, to be hosted by himself and called Nothing Special. I would have watched it. (Updike wrote somewhere that the show was one of Warhol’s few unfulfilled ambitions.) I’m also not yet bored by the line about fame and however many minutes it is. How many throwaway lines come back to you, perforce, as you read today’s newspapers? As I ...”

“... eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its originality, but being original is not the same as being true: her prose is a trick, an artful ventriloquism. A handful of devices – dropped articles, prepositions at the end of sentences, a ...”

“... in so much recent fiction is striking. What happened to the suburban novel of a generation ago? John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy charted the suburban ascendance more or less as it was happening, and the popularity of those books was perhaps some measure of confidence in the life we were living. Now that suburbia is a place where property values can ...”

“... work. Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s ...”

“... to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’ The Writers’ Union is a pleasant one-storeyed 19th-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We ...”

“... had proved impossible: the tone didn’t exist; the attempt was embarrassing and disgusting. Even Updike had failed when it came to getting real sex onto the page, he argued (‘he sent a Japanese camera crew into the bed but didn’t get anywhere’): the writer’s best strategy and Amis’s own preferred method was to make the sex pornographic ...”

“... of American magazines and the man on the omnibus had ‘some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever’. In Crossroads, a man ‘in the vitamin business’, Franzen’s idea of a regular Joe, buys ‘the recent Mailer, the recent Updike’. Free from the ‘total electronic distraction of our time’, Franzen’s ...”

“... of baguette between her teeth so you can’t see her smile. Back in the US, Bouvier got engaged to John Husted, a Wall Street stockbroker, but once her mother learned that he earned just $17,000 a year, the engagement was called off. She made gestures towards an entry-level position at the CIA and won the Paris Prize at Vogue – six months working at the ...”

“... Drinking is part of the equation. I don’t mean to make it sound as if Antrim has become John O’Hara with a cell phone. No, a disciple of Barthelme conquers the territory of Cheever and Updike – it’s stunning. ‘Another Manhattan’, from 2008, the longest and most wrenching of these pieces, begins as if ...”

“... Foster Wallace, speaking for ‘the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully’, to characterise the typical Updikean baby boomer as ‘an asshole’. Gates’s men are often assholes, no question, but in place of a Rabbit-like serenity about their desires they’re equipped with Wallace-style habits of ...”

“... is so accomplished – so admiring of the word-perfect 20th-century Flauberts: Pritchett, Bellow, Updike, Nabokov – that even though there may be notes we don’t like in his writing, there are never false notes. And yet it is too obvious that Mike Hoolihan, however much (at long last) she ‘represents’ the female voice in Amis’s boyish fiction – and ...”

“... That she was toeing the Party line didn’t occur to me, though it did to my companion, John Scaife, another budding conscript, who was much more scathing on the subject and cynical about the tears. 2 February. Ten days or so ago I did an interview for the Today programme in connection with the revival of The History Boys now playing at ...”