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“... Forster’s life was ‘ridiculously inane’: ‘the man is dying of inanition,’ he told Mary Cannan ten days after the visit.‘He was very angry with me for telling him about himself.’ The main effect of the visit was that Lawrence got steamed up to the point of sending off a long letter to Bertrand Russell denouncing money and demanding a sexual ...”

“... Printing even a writer’s letters is at times an equivocal business. There’s always the question of what, exactly, of value they may tell us, of what there is that makes their publication more than merely intrusive. Forster lived a long time, and there’s some sorry reading in the second of these volumes. To Joe Ackerley in 1947 from the USA: ‘the view from the window is the Californian desert, mistaken by me for the Nevadan ...”

“... Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets. But he did rather like the atmosphere of the place. Eleanor ...”

“... of snobbishness. The twinkle in her eye contains the flash of an AR-15 and the gold leaf of Mar-a-Lago and the rays of a monstrance and the rhinestone of a Juicy Couture sweatsuit. Reading this novel, I thought (warily? unfortunately?) of David Foster Wallace, also white, also Midwestern, though the child of college professors. The portal has censured Wallace ...”

“... to philosopher-doyenne Hannah Arendt’s New Year’s Eve party, attends a small dinner party at Mary McCarthy’s ‘meticulously furnished apartment’, and receives his ‘first summons’ to a posh Park Avenue salon stocked with ‘titled European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any Tom Wolfe-ish observations ...”