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“... hard to come by in this book. He would have been 29, with one novel, Dangling Man, to his credit. Diana Trilling, who was to become an enthusiastic reviewer of later novels, didn’t much like this first one, but it did impress Philip Rahv, an editor of Partisan Review and, though less so, a fellow editor, Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald took the ...”

“... engrossing portraits of egotism, greed, opportunism and general frailty. Powell was criticised by Diana Trilling for devoting her attention to characters who, in their venality and shallowness, were unworthy of her gifts, but this doesn’t seem quite right. We delight in Powell’s tales of ‘types’ because we know them well: hacks like Dennis ...”

“... sucking up to the young. This trope of absurdity was the one favoured by all his enemies from Diana Trilling to Irving Howe. But Wreszin’s account makes clear that for his subject, the Indo-China war and its domestic analogues were decisive. There was the hated war-machine to be confronted, with its attendants in the military-intellectual ...”

“... encourage the steady contemplation of the psychopath in him and in oneself, but not only of that. Diana Trilling, in an essay which paid Mailer the compliment of fear as well as of admiration, was rightly horrified by what Mailer said in 1961 about a brutal murder. What he said was this: Let’s use our imaginations. It means that one human being has ...”

“... endeavour for what he lacked in patriotism. ‘The simplicity of Mr Isherwood’s style,’ Diana Trilling wrote, ‘is a reflection neither of condescension nor assertion. It is the style of a free and generous intelligence, most happily balanced between self-tolerance and tolerance of others.’ The Trillings, it must be said, were always on the ...”

“... in New York they knew Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Alfred Kazin, John Cheever, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark.When Hazzard met Steegmuller, he was engaged in an on-off relationship with another woman, or so he said. ‘Everybody knew’ he was gay, according to Olubas’s sources, except, apparently, Hazzard. ‘Do ...”

“... When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our ...”

“... she never stopped educating – herself. ‘Of the cruelties directed at this young woman,’ Diana Trilling wrote after Monroe’s death, ‘even by the public that loved her, it seems to me that the most biting and unworthy of the supposedly enlightened people who were particularly guilty of it, was the mockery of her wish to be educated, or ...”

“... his long-suffering wife and in the ensconcing of a short-suffering Mosley with his other help-meet Diana Guinness née Mitford. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky avers that ‘Mosley always tried to maintain the old English distinction between private life and public life.’ But Mosley came up against that other, even more powerful, old English tradition ...”

“... in 1963, I met many of Saunders’s cast of characters at social events on Morningside Heights: Diana and Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald – all of them brilliant, feisty, friendly and endlessly voluble. Some of their hangers-on were third-rate intellectual goons like Arnold Beichmann ...”