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“... When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s souped-up, superheated journalistic account of the beginnings of the counterculture, published six years earlier. The coincidence of material was in many ways inevitable ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself ...”

“... Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books – from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate – have been much admired ...”

“... stands aside from the general course of imaginative fiction. It is probably meant to do so. Robert Stone is also engaged with political disaster. His earlier novel Dog Soldiers was about the legacy of corruption left to America by the Vietnam War. In A Flag for Sunrise the theme is American incursion into the Third World. The scene is the small ...”

“... by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces ...”

“... it’s more controlled, with less cartoonish focal characters and, early on, a good line in Robert Stone-like unease. The main action takes place in Indonesia during Sukarno’s confrontation with Malaysia, and again there’s the germ of an allegory: at the heart of the plot are two orphaned boys who’ve been separated and brought up in the ...”

“... behind Mallarmé’s obfuscations and Proust’s longueurs to join dependable storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The ...”

“... ominous gadgetry, the endless neon and rain. But Gibson – ‘very much under the influence of Robert Stone’, as well as Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs – was among the first to find a centre-stage role for information technology in his future scenarios. His stories were set in a world of porous borders, where multinationals and crime cartels ...”

“... pairliament, a birth in stane. And when we’re deid they gie us – stane, like this: a ‘simple stone’, whaur all Scotia ‘Should pour her sorrows o’er her poet’s dust’. Whit’s wrang wi dust? I’ve no min’ here to flyte wi Burns, but staunin unner the Calton Hill, Embro’s ‘disgrace’; amang these smeekit monuments, I’m thinking ...”

“... need you as midlife midwife, ministering angel, To birth my crisis. O She, O Isis, come O Rolling Stone, O Mick-chick, O stone-age Raquel, George Eliot-brained, late-teen Emanuelle, Let me embrace you, let me hide my light Under your bushel, come, O come Now to my achy-breaky heart, the one Still ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... at the Prague Jewish cemetery: “ ‘What’s left for us?” I asked. “Only time,” said Robert. “But there’s not much of it.” ’ Indiscriminate murder of civilian populations is, alas, at least as old as recorded history. What differentiates the modern German version, as has often been observed, is its implementation through industrial ...”

“... heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at its centre, even though it ...”

“... Suddenly I thought: ‘My God, he’s going to speak to me!’ ‘Am I right in thinking you’re Robert Melville?’ he said. ‘My name is Clark.’ ‘Indisputably, Sir Kenneth,’ I answered. I remember the word I used, because as soon as I said it I realised that it was ludicrously inappropriate. And I went on quickly: ‘It’s a fine Pasmore, isn’t ...”