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“... his head out of a roadside cabin still following, and followed. Near Anahorish: a Visitation For Louis Simpson I I stood between them, the one with his scanning intelligence and fencer’s containment, his speech like a bowstring, and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I’d ...”

“... of tone may indicate the discovery of a new and less self-defensively whimsical manner. Louis Simpson’s new poems work by an accumulation of observations too, but the tone is so much more relaxed and affable, and the pieces so innocent of any form, that they give the impression of having been transcribed from a tape-recording of ...”

“... of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental tyrant, a thief, a philistine enemy of poetry, a narcissist ...”

“... As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective review of his book? Or, as a reviewer opening with a confession of this sort – what in the lingo of our day is called a ‘full disclosure’ – have I then somehow neutralised my personal stake in such a way that I can offer my opinion as unbiased? Can such reflexivity work to undo the debilitating effects of situatedness? These are the kinds of question that agonise Simpson, who has written Situatedness in the hope of stemming the tide of what he calls, following Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics ...”

“... following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in ...”

“... bat. A book may be lurking there, as it must in many other corners of the legal attic. Brian Simpson himself embarked on such an enterprise some years ago with the 19th-century case, known to every law student, of the Crown v. Dudley and Stephens – the captain and mate of the yacht Mignonette who survived a ship-wreck by eating the cabin boy and were ...”

“... letter from 2000 written to Hoy in which Hecht remembered writing a Guggenheim recommendation for Louis Simpson and then Simpson saying ‘from the vantage of his post at Berkeley he would see what he could do to get me invited out to read at several campuses in California’. Years later, Hecht discovered that when ...”

“... I missed most of the original hoopla in the O.J. Simpson story because I happened to be spending the weekend in a televisionfree zone, as a house-guest in the Connecticut countryside. We all thought, before we secluded ourselves, that O.J. had probably done it; the widely publicised bloodstained ski mask (which has since mutated, as a piece of evidence, into the far less memorable knitted cap) seemed to seal his fate ...”

“... thing to say given all the media attention ‘race issues’ receive in this country – the O.J. Simpson verdict, Susan Smith alleging that a black man killed her children, the Million Man March and Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell and his non-bid for office, Affirmative Action and so on and on. Anyone would think that ...”

“... Who would have expected Louis de Bernières to follow up Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with the soft-centred biography of a lovable pooch? Red Dog could be seen as a reversion to national type – the English, Nabokov witheringly remarked, feel sorry for the blind man’s dog. And where there are soft spots, to coin a book-trade proverb, there’s hard cash ...”

“... The trial that followed has been described as the most sensational in the States until O.J. Simpson came along. Stanford White’s style was Beaux Arts, which the author equates with Neoclassical. She also calls it ‘imperial’, meaning, presumably, ‘dominating’ or even ‘domineering’; and reflecting the ruthlessness of Edith Wharton’s Gilded ...”

“... the Order of the Crown of Italy, one of the highest decorations of the Mussolini regime. Ernest Simpson, the dull partner in a shipping firm whom Wallis married in 1928, had close business ties with Fascist Italy. But her feeling for Fascism cannot be attributed only to her men friends. On the contrary, the ‘new social order’ brayed around the world by ...”

“... on the contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need ...”

“... commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than with the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of ‘democratic citizenship’ and ‘civic identity’. Here original truths matter less than accumulated ...”

“... Carmen acquired a lifelong revulsion for the Catholic Church. All through lockdown, Carmen, Helen Simpson, Graeme Segal and I met monthly online for our tiny book club. One of the books Carmen praised wholeheartedly was Small Things like These: Claire Keegan’s vicious and hypocritical nuns epitomised exactly what she found objectionable. 1960s-70s. Virago ...”