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“... In France, we do it lying down,’ a French minister is reported to have said on first seeing the tango. He was not far wrong. The tango crystallised at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires. It was a dance of prostitutes and pimps, and in its ineluctable rhythms, its belly-to-belly stance, its interlacing of legs, it reflected their professional concerns ...”

“... patron saint of modern art? His diaries can now be read for the first time in their original form. Joan Acocella’s restoration is a job very well done: she has elegantly failed to spare the blushes of the dead, and instead what we have is a final, proper edition of Nijinsky’s diary, a dark assemblage that can sometimes read like out-takes from the ...”

“... done: snatch up La Duse and let gabbly old Bernhardt go to hell. In her new book on the novelist, Joan Acocella speaks with some reverence of Cath-er’s ‘Duse revelation’: the young writer’s precocious verdict, having seen both actresses perform onstage in the 1890s, that Duse was the superior artist because of the classical restraint she ...”

“... a thief, a shkotz. The ‘very ignobility’ of such characters ‘is a bid for respectability’, Joan Acocella wrote in the New Yorker. ‘Bellow doesn’t feel that he has to protect them. And by that route he made the lives of Jews a normal subject for American literature.’ And Chabon is returning to this tradition. His zany implausible unhistorical ...”

“... spectral engagement with their mother. Liveright’s restored edition contains an introduction by Joan Acocella. Her tone is characteristically droll, except when it becomes strangely grudging, as if she is unconvinced that Duncan was worth all the fuss. It’s odd, considering that Acocella wrote a book on the ...”

“... genius and madness, and in particular about modernist madness. In the most obvious sense, as Joan Acocella notes in her introduction to the 1999 edition, mad people, like avant-garde artists, are used to being misunderstood. But Moore goes further. She thinks that ‘many of the diary’s characteristics are qualities of early modernist ...”

“... legend of Henry Roth the master novelist who called it silence for sixty years’, as he puts it. Joan Acocella, for example, has suggested that Roth may have had ‘another, less sensational problem: that he couldn’t produce a finished manuscript without a full-time editor’. Kellman broadly confirms this – Weil and Steele even wrote the last ...”

“... out of the book if they keep a glossary within easy reach. It was nice to have a bit of help from Joan Acocella when it comes to Nureyev’s obsession with Bournonvillean petite batterie: his ‘goddamn ronds de jambe and those little steppy things’. Kavanagh is very illuminating, though, on national company styles, on the speed and strength of the New ...”