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“... For many years​ I held certain assumptions about Larry McMurtry. Without ever having read his novels, I thought of him as a prolific – perhaps excessively prolific – author of sentimental bestsellers, most of them sequels or prequels to earlier successes. I knew that a few good movies had been adapted from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited ...”

“... me think about my own work’. Hornby’s list is erratic, as anyone’s would be, running from Larry McMurtry through to Barbra Streisand and Arsène Wenger. But two figures stand out, and, he thinks, justify direct comparison. Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius (Viking, £9.99) is a book that, far from crying out to be written, was ...”

“... For decades it has been almost impossible to find. In 1989, with Beasley’s fate still a mystery, Larry McMurtry encouraged the Book Club of Texas to bring out an edition of five hundred copies for which he wrote an afterword. Most of these are now in libraries in Texas. As early as 1934, Beasley’s original publisher, Robert McAlmon, was complaining ...”

“... are, and despite the recent successes of ‘literary’ writers who have used the genre (notably Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy), the Western still awaits its Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, or even its Georgette Heyer: that is, the writer capable of lifting its clichés into art. Elmore Leonard might have done it, had he not ...”

“... flickered for a few years and then burned out. In his memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry writes: ‘There circulated, in the Sixties, the legend that Thomas Pynchon read only the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it was even said that much of the erudition in V. came out of the N-O volume of that great work.’ There’s erudition in ...”

“... and thereby gave the book its structure of quest. Some readers – the novelist and essayist Larry McMurtry, for example – like the scroll better, but odds are the scroll would have remained unpublished, or unread if printed, or dismissed if read, which is roughly what happened to the later books. The rewrite came later, however, when Glassman was ...”

“... as Joan of Arc was the same woman who ate so much caviar at Petrossian on 58th Street that, Larry McMurtry said, she ‘decimated the species’. A series of movies and bestsellers had made him rich, and Susan took full advantage of his good fortune. One evening, his flight from Washington was delayed, and when he got to the restaurant, the maitre ...”

“... any attack on that hedonism as the ultimate affront to their political and personal freedom – Larry Kramer remarked that just staying alive had become a political act for gay men. A few years before the plague appeared, in 1978, Kramer had risen to prominence – and controversy – on the new wave of gay literature with his novel Faggots. Fiction with ...”