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“... When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, not everyone was gratified. Clive Sinclair begins The Brothers Singer with a quotation from a BBC radio interview broadcast minutes after the award had been announced: the ‘astounded’ interviewer suspected that ‘some kind of American Mafia’ was at work in the Nobel Committee, while the ‘serious’ Professor Bradbury, discounting this theory, ascribed Singer’s triumph to ‘the domination of American writing in the world today ...”

“... broach the subject. Today, by contrast, a scarred identity earns almost universal respect. Peter Singer’s Pushing Time Away reflects this shift. He used to be, he says, far too busy writing his philosophy to bother with his grandfather. It was only when he noticed an affinity between his work on ‘practical ethics’ and his maternal grandfather’s wish ...”

“... The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime ...”

“... When Joseph Roth was asked once to write about his earliest memory, he described how as a baby he had seen his mother strip his cradle and hand it over to a strange woman, who ‘holds it to her chest, as though it were some trifling object of negligible dimensions, speaks for a long time, smiles, showing her long yellow teeth, goes to the door and leaves the house ...”

“... and musical justification. Salieri’s apotheosis, conducted under the benevolent gaze of Emperor Joseph II, began in earnest with the curious history of Les Danaïdes, an opera to an Italian libretto which Gluck commissioned from Calzabigi and then had translated into French by François Du Roullet and Theodor Tschudi. Gluck did not set Les Danaïdes ...”

“... of mind, all of which are virtually unknown in Italy, except by some sophisticated readers of Joseph Roth, Bellow, Singer, Malamud, Potok, and of course yourself. Levi’s explained intention does not mean that there is no autobiography in the book. The wish to evoke a Jewish resistance to Nazism relates to a history ...”

“... Logic is doubtless unshakeable,’ Joseph K. thinks towards the end of The Trial, ‘but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.’ He is wrong, of course, since he is killed within a page by the brutal logic of the novel he is in. But there is a logic that resists such logic, and one of its masters is Joseph H ...”

“... conventional ambitions. The first-person narrator of this book is, as usual, an outsider, an opera singer who spends most of his time in foreign hotels on tour. This estranged position allows him to make many peevish observations about the general crassness around him, but here it’s convincingly in character: Marías paints a fastidious, endearingly ...”

“... getting a shave at the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue. The Gallo brothers made the hit: Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’, Larry, and Albert ‘Kid Blast’. They were accompanied by an ugly little torpedo named Joseph ‘Joe Jelly’ Giorelli, who finished the job with a bullet to the back of Anastasia’s head. These four ...”

“... I grow up, can I become a hangman?’The Scarlet Empress was the sixth film Dietrich made with Joseph von Sternberg. They made seven together between 1930 and 1935, the first in Germany, the others in the US. Sternberg said she attracted him with her ‘cold disdain’, her lack of interest in what she was supposed to be interested in. And it’s worth ...”

“... in Limbo.’ God Knows has a lightning flash on the cover, looking like Mosley’s armlet, but Joseph Heller’s novel is not deliberately anti-Jewish. It is meant to be an autobiography of King David, the sweet singer of Israel, as told by a wisecracking New Yorker who fancies himself as a Jewish wit. Cocteau once said ...”

“... should do a bit of digging: Crosby is a fascinating character. As well as a subtly revolutionary singer he was a technophile obsessed with recording techniques, and with how best to refine and update them to suit the new, softer style of singing and playing. Crosby was the original ‘crooner’ when the world was full of vocalists who belted out songs to ...”

“... take on ageing glam rock: one of the mocked-up female faces looks like Brian Connolly, the lead singer of the Sweet. Linder initially drew or painted over found images: on a page from a Damart catalogue, for instance, she gave thermal underwear models garish lingerie and scurrilous genitalia. Guided by Ades’s book, she turned exclusively to montage. Her ...”

“... between this newcomer and Charlotte, then an art student, and her stepmother Paulinka, an opera singer. The author’s irony dwells on all her characters, but inside the story her heroine Charlotte, though romantically in love, employs her own irony both on Daberlohn and on herself. But most of the text of the book comes from him: his theory of masks, death ...”

“... on England. Deschooling and little red books are everywhere. Peter has taken up with a ‘a folk singer woman’. Her mother (‘Mumma’) conveys the bad news, stressing each terrible item of offence: ‘vegan food ... macrobiotic ... hippy ... R.D. Laing ... Joan Baez ... probably on pot’. ‘Is he living with her?’ an appalled Anthea asks ...”