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“... suitcase; his pathetic nest-building sexpots of women; his terminally self-admiring writers. Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies won the Ernest Hemingway and Aer Lingus prizes when it came out last year, and the paperback carries glowing tributes from Christopher Hope and Paul Bailey. I don’t find myself reaching for superlatives like them, but it ...”

“... Charles Bataille said of his friend Félix Nadar, ‘turbulent, unexpected, terrifying’. Adam Begley’s biography describes a life lived so frenetically, it’s surprising it lasted so long – Nadar died at the age of ninety, in 1910. Yet he is remembered today primarily for the stillness and serenity of his photographic portraits of 19th-century ...”

“... down. (Called Home, it was dismantled and used for spare parts.) But one gets the sense from Adam Begley’s sharp and diverting biography that he felt a little bit dead anytime a piece under his byline (or, in the old New Yorker, with his name at the end) wasn’t on the newsstands. ‘Johnny knew it was possible to be a writer because he saw me ...”

“... impossible to settle in law, he was almost certain to be found guilty. ‘It is impossible,’ Louis Begley writes in his recent book about the affair, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, ‘to overstate Zola’s courage.’2 Zola’s trial was billed as the social event of the decade. It was the place where anyone who was anyone went to see and be ...”

“... Crowe Ransom and Delmore Schwartz, and that later she married A.J. Liebling and was friends with Louis Auchincloss, Wilfrid Sheed and Howard Moss, does not suffice. Roberts hopes to add spice to his book by playing detective with Stafford’s medical record – this also does not suffice. Stafford escaped from an unhappy Colorado home by applying herself at ...”

“... one of Kafka’s quips about the Jewish people: ‘My people, provided that I have one.’ As Louis Begley has recently made clear in a quite candid biographical essay, Kafka remained not only in two minds about Jewishness, but sometimes quite clearly torn apart. ‘What have I in common with Jews?’ he wrote in a diary entry in 1914. ‘I have ...”