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“... In the America of Russell Banks’s novels, men risk ruin to buy a new speedboat. A man who punches his wife tells himself he’s not actually a wife beater. Drunk driving is just one of those ‘little things’, but speaking French is not allowed. A paedophile rapist starts crying when his stepson turns him down, and a schemer with a ‘system for beating the system’ offs himself in a Cadillac he can’t afford; when his brother discovers the body, the ‘neatly typed’ suicide note reads: ‘I’m a failure ...”

“... talking to a Grundig TK46 tape recorder, so his life story was doled out in reels, not chapters. Russell Banks found these reels, he tells us, in the basement of the public library in St Cloud, Florida. It was 1999, and Hurricane Irene (‘I rain’) had just barrelled through, flooding the town and rubbishing library materials. ‘The Magic ...”

“... in the US. For a non-American non-novelist to be a Book of the Month choice was unknown. But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for ...”

“... less literary, sources: we may wonder, for example, whether the image of the river overflowing its banks in ‘The Advice’ owes anything to Strafford’s defence to Article Four of his impeachment, a source which would surely have been known to Rochester. A historian may make a bigger contribution by asking what Rochester tells us about the world in which he ...”

“... his clear, sober and authoritative history of British multinational banking, the strength of those banks in the 19th century rested on British economic and political pre-eminence. Their core market was British business, whose requirements they serviced. Those who worked in finance and commerce were not operating in a vacuum, they were operating under ...”

“... chair of the steering group of the American Battle Monuments Committee, told the architect, John Russell Pope, in 1925: ‘This is the most important monument and for this reason it has been entrusted to you.’ Pope was one of the most successful and visible American architects of the era – he designed the National Gallery in Washington, the Jefferson ...”

“... Black Sox, Gregorio Cortez. Such writers as Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Turkel and Russell Banks were his partisans (the last three introducing posthumous reissues of the fiction). But Nelson Algren speaks for the Forties: he did not write a major work after the Cold War defeat of the American Left and the 1950 crack-up with Beauvoir. A ...”

“... both powerful and powerless – government officials, or merely the behaviour of dogs. Russell Hoban’s forecast of the future thus depends on the past, and his characters are aware of us. The men of How Fents make their living from digging our iron engines out of the mud, and Riddley Walker laments, without irony, among the ruins of what seems to ...”

“... insensitive. I remember the silver wedding party given by dear friends who lived on the banks of the Thames in an idyllic setting but where the architecture ran to the kind of bungalow celebrated by Kingsley Amis in The Riverside Villa Murder. Deputed to propose the couple’s health, Huw looked around perplexedly and said something about this ...”

“... in evidence everywhere,’ writes Nicolas at one point, and this observation certainly applies to Russell Celyn Jones’s second novel Small Times, much of which takes place alongside London’s canal ways and the banks of the Thames. Turning to this book involves a sudden sea-change, because we are back in the clipped ...”

“... arrived in 1931, symbolically and actually, on the Dublin doorstep of the poet and editor George Russell (Æ), having walked the sixty-odd miles from Inniskeen in his patched-up workclothes. He had already published a poem, ‘Ploughman’, in the Irish Statesman, a journal edited by Russell which Kavanagh had first picked ...”

“... than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearings from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American ...”

“... history’ belie Mukherjee’s claim: it has been largely ‘white writers like William Styron and Russell Banks and Robert Olen Butler and Neal Stephenson who … assert the privilege of other-narration’, while ‘minority writers … have typically been asked to slot themselves into a single ethnos.’But McGurl doesn’t follow this thought to its ...”

“... nothing so much as an airless bell-jar. A recent essay by a younger Midwestern writer, Scott Russell Sanders, deplores the virtual absence of any thorough-going representation of the non-human world – of nature and the cosmos – in contemporary American fiction. The first, and the least typical, episode of The Runaway Soul describes a 40-mile bike ...”

“... of Salford University. The next year, Hurst Park closed: a lovely, hospitable course on the banks of the Thames, not far from Hampton Park; where its winning post was, there is now a supermarket. In America such losses would hardly matter, since all their tracks are roughly the same, monotonous sand or dirt-covered ovals. Breeders have not yet cracked ...”