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“... felt for the book would then rest on the wrong, insufficient premises. This is a situation that Gilbert Adair will be glad not to have had to face. His astonishing adaptation of Perec’s novel makes no secret of its lipogrammatic status: the front-cover blurb proceeds loyally enough without any es, only to blow the gaff in the final few words and tell ...”

“... Gilbert Adair the critic writes with feeling and practised bitterness about the anxiety of influence – ‘that looming, lowering pressure exerted, wilfully or not, by those who have already “made it” on those who have not, a pressure cramping, crushing and on occasion castrating the creative energies of the rising generation ...”

“... Philip Venturi, author of the feisty manifesto Learning from Las Vegas) is now itself parodied in Gilbert Adair’s funny and accomplished second novel. The narrator of Love and Death on Long Island is the Hampstead-inhabiting author of four novels more popular in France than in this country, as well as of ‘a history of angels’. As the novel opens ...”

“... limits these are immensely enjoyable and successful stories. ‘Enjoyable’ is the word too for Gilbert Adair’s jokey fiction around and about the case of Léopold Sfax, who might be called a philosophical cousin not very removed of Paul de Man. Sfax, like de Man, arrived in America as a young man in flight from German-occupied France. He has a great ...”

“... Manila in 1966 to hear President Johnson announce his intensified programme of bombs and napalm. Gilbert Adair sets himself to find out what Hollywood made of all this servitude et grandeur militaire. It made very little of it apparently, preferring to go on serving its standard fare of romantic trivialities: the paucity of war films has the negative ...”

“... was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994).1 W, ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) finds in the letter of its title both a cipher for a missing child thought to have survived a shipwreck, and a vision of a rigidly ordered polis on an island off Tierra del Fuego inhabited, as ...”

“... essay on the Carry On series written as an April Fool’s joke for Sight and Sound, Gilbert Adair described Williams’s persona in these films as one in which ‘the codified signs of the (flamboyant) homosexual – effeminate gestures, a mincing walk, a falsetto voice – stop short of any definitive implication of homosexuality as a ...”

“... Truffaut called Hitchcock an ‘artist of anxiety’. Truffaut was himself anxious enough, and a great admirer of Hitchcock, but his own best films are a mixture of lightness and weight, as Kundera might say, of gaiety and distress; plenty of pain, tragedy even, but nothing as taut, as possessive as anxiety. Truffaut was the artist of a particular kind of restlessness: the wonderful restlessness of his early films – Les 400 Coups (1959), Shoot the pianist (1960), Jules and Jim (1962 ...”

“... three-hundred-odd-page e-less novel (brilliantly and e-lessly translated a few years ago by Gilbert Adair as A Void), and his Life a User’s Manual, whose Oulipian underpinnings are spelt out in this Compendium, in the definition of the Graeco-Latin bi-square, a mathematical construct of some complexity that I’d rather someone other than me ...”

“... set beside such feats as eliminating the letter ‘e’ (Perec’s La Disparition, Englished by Gilbert Adair as A Void) or telling Ophelia’s side of the story using only the words Shakespeare allots her (Paul Griffiths’s Let Me Tell You). McBride compensates by scattering full stops with a liberal, raisin-loaf-making hand, but her avoidance of ...”

“... anything you might think of as stroke-related. Back in London I often used to bump into the writer Gilbert Adair on Portobello Road, both before his stroke (always smoking, never healthy-looking) and after, when he was, as he put it, ‘sadly diminished’. I last saw him, shuffling around with a friend, struggling to remember who I was, a couple of ...”