“... I commented. A student in my seminar on confession – very PC – turned in a paper (on Philip Roth) that began: ‘Every mother wants what’s best for his or her son.’ ‘This is so wrong and on so many levels,’ I wrote, ‘that I don’t even know where to begin.’ As you can tell, then, my main way of dealing with this ridiculous ...”

“... was to throw a shovel of dirt onto the coffin. The family went first, using the shovel, then came Philip Roth, who threw the soil into the grave with his hands. Almost everyone else went up to pick up the shovel. ‘What was remarkable,’ my friend said, ‘was that one was reminded of the sheer labour it takes to replace all that soil. For half an ...”

“... nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a ...”

“... remember when he had last reread the novel.WritersI heard, from separate sources, that both Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild ...”

“... arty B-movies, or B art-movies, at the same time that Lethem was writing Amnesia Moon, a homage to Philip K. Dick, and Gun, with Occasional Music, a homage to Chandler and Hammett; graffiti and other outsider art started appearing in museums and auction houses; and DJ-worship replaced the mid-century cult of the conductor. It’s possible, in other words, to ...”

“... and also inevitably baffle, bore, offend or annoy the hell out of everyone else’. The task, as Philip Roth once wrote, is ‘to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction … To allow for the chaos, to let it ...”

“... Can you name the author who set you thinking? For Philip French, at a Bristol grammar school in the 1950s, the enlighteners were Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. For me, at a Wimbledon grammar school in the 1950s, Bertrand Russell filled the slot on his own, largely because his History of Western Philosophy was so long ...”

“... a sex-starved manipulator in the role of professor and a passive lily as his student victim; Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal† goes further and paints a boastful sexual predator for whom all women students are ‘meat’, all conversation is foreplay, and all love is lust. The protagonists of The Dying Animal and its predecessor, The Human ...”

“... For Yang and Tomine, the canonical writer of Jewish assimilation is Babel’s American heir, Philip Roth, who transplanted the sphere of action from war to dating. Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) relates the adventures of a Chinese boy called Jin Wang who so longs to be attractive to white girls that he manages to sublimate himself into a ...”

“... was the closest the country ever came to a genuine Fascist figurehead (a possibility imagined by Philip Roth in his remarkable counterfactual novel The Plot against America). Now that Fascism was dead, control of the skies could revert to being an all-American activity. The federal government was free to pour money into it like there was no ...”

“... a much more effective shield than is secrecy.’ And there are other, more subtle stratagems. Philip Roth once talked about writers of fiction as playing ‘the what-if game’: unless he’s content to sit like a spider in the middle of a novel-about-a-novel-about-a-novel, the writer is inevitably engaging in spreadsheeted counterfactuals about what ...”

“... tangled relationship between faith and community in America. But the American canon does include Philip Roth, as well as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, in whom Bloom found dark offshoots of the gnostic belief that the self is a shard of light which has its origins outside the creation, a belief he regarded as the foundation of the greatest American ...”

“... as just an author, in the way they think of authors even as popularly eminent as Salman Rushdie or Philip Roth. He’s a trendy-essay-topic catch-all, a figure half fact and half popular-culture fantasy, forever turning up in conspiracy theories and comic strips and on the World Wide Web. He’s an enigma, a beatnik hero. He is, in short, a ...”

“... much, or, in the case of very technical and abstract inquiries, not at all. We tend to think that Philip Roth bears a different relationship to Portnoy’s Complaint than Albert Einstein does to E=mc2. Indeed, when Einstein was asked, aged 67, to reflect on his life, his 25-page ‘Autobiographical Notes’ was dense with equations and he insisted that ...”

“... Reformed, with a capital ‘R’, means Calvinist. The historian of the Jews in England was Cecil Roth, not Philip. Stephen Gosson never became a Catholic monk. Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, did not ‘trust’ that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English ...”