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“... power, ‘however squalid’. If Patrick White is preoccupied with ‘the great creative ego’, Max Apple, a Jewish Mid-Westerner living in Houston, often goes back to the original Creator in the stories in Free Agents, his excellent first collection. In ‘Stranger at the Table’, an autobiographical essay about the impediments to, and the necessity ...”

“... eccentric, demonstrable only in the special surroundings of highly-coloured fiction provided by Max Apple’s The Propheteers, which makes them into the threads of a very uncomfortable web indeed, one in which post-war American society is caricatured with remorseless precision, its values inflated into religious terms that seem ludicrous only at ...”

“... unequal to the complex of feelings evoked by the main historical narrative. The rock upon which Max Apple builds his life in Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story is Herman ‘Rocky’ Goodstein, as whole and undismayable a self as ever lived. ‘Rocky’, Apple’s maternal grandfather, was born in Lithuania in ...”

“... West at two was an outstandingly beautiful child, and one might have expected him to be the apple of Rebecca’s eye. Instead he was at best an inconvenience, at worst a pawn in her ritual game with his father. In such a background there was much to wound a small child. Anthony West has written two books about his parents’ relationship: a ...”

“... European literature is, really, the big influence,’ mentioning, among others, Reverdy, Max Jacob, Breton, Supervielle, Apollinaire and, somewhat surprisingly, Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet. Even in monstrous translations his lyrics make the hair on the back of one’s neck curl.’ The ‘monstrous ...”

“... Moore’s new novel, her fourth, Finn is a high-school history teacher living in Illinois, and Max is lying in a bed in the Bronx not quite sure where he is, though he knows he’s on the way out. Finn has been trying to figure out what on earth he’s going to say. Maybe he could tell ‘anecdotes that were amusing’ – but not too amusing, because it ...”

“... his relations so vigorously that his administration became known as the ‘Hotel Cecil’, and the apple of his eye was undoubtedly his nephew, Arthur Balfour. A delicate and bookish young man, Balfour was at first written off by men of the world as a bit of a cissy. At Cambridge he was nicknamed ‘Pretty Fanny’, and it was noted that instead of riding and ...”

“... at the boundary of the human in general. She had a friend who reserved the greatest hatred for Max Brod – he should never have published his papers, the world should have been a closed eye against Kafka, after all he was his friend. No, she couldn’t quite get there. She preferred a world that was stark and staring, that looked unforgivably into the ...”

“... their observations.’ J.M.W. Turner, ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’ (1832) It reads like a Max Beerbohm caricature. On the other hand, in the poems, letters and journals Holmes quotes there are things noticed which convince you that note-taking is an essential part of a poet’s job. Observation becomes vigorous engagement: ‘My Glass, being opposite ...”

“... Daily Mail and then by its own subsequent and most famous owner, Lord Beaverbrook, who, as Sir Max Aitken, had effectively taken control of the Daily Express in 1915. Perhaps there was always something a bit archaic about the Standard as a national daily. For all the fame of its foreign correspondents – the boys’ author G.A. Henty was one – or the ...”

“... Karl, the city’s leading theatre designer, lived in fashionable Charlottenburg, staged plays for Max Reinhardt, and was close friends with the artists of the Berlin Secession, for whom Robert briefly, and fecklessly, served as secretary. But he seems to have lacked even the most elementary skills in what he called ‘social instinct’. He ‘boozed ...”

“... to suggest I write article on two exhibitions in London next month: Man Ray photos at Barbican, Max Ernst at Tate. Thursday 10: Ron Stocker to lunch. Listened to ‘Schönberg in Hollywood’ on Radio 3. Wrote to thank Jean-Claude, and send him copy of Jean Follain collection in the Poésie series. Judy tired and seems indifferent to the fate of the ...”

“... read, which does not mean to say that it may be absorbed, in the time it takes to polish off your apple and cheese. Prose, if it happens to be Dostoevskian epic with injections of Tolstoy, will keep you busy for a solid month and easily stop you getting on with whatever it is you are supposed to be doing if you are not Anthony Burgess. About as quickly as I ...”

“... telegram invited Guinness to the occasion, even though as Edith Sitwell had confided earlier to Max Adrian, ‘Alec Guinness is not a Plantagenet.’ He was asked to stay at Renishaw with his wife and infant son, but the latter had to be concealed from Osbert, who was allergic to babies. Dinner was interrupted by the butler’s announcement that young ...”

“... DNA research. That book was explicitly offered as an ethnographic meditation on a theme from Max Weber, and so, too, is French DNA. In his 1917 lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber explored the tension between virtue and expertise, autonomy and institutional discipline, in the changing identity of 20th-century intellectuals and in the moral ...”