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“... that evil is present in the world as a positive force? In spite of the slightly defensive tone of Sally Fitzgerald’s introduction to The Habit of Being, behind which seems to lie a worry that readers might decide that every Flannery O’Connor story about a banal widow and her surly, smart-ass child must be a direct transcription from the author’s ...”

“... until the summer of 1952, shortly after the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor ...”

“... Zelda Fitzgerald would probably call herself a post-feminist today, but when she was alive, she made herself a flapper. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s charmingly wild wife told an interviewer that she hoped her daughter’s generation would be even ‘jazzier’ than her own: ‘I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, light-hearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate, than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness ...”

“... have now been reprinted by Virago. It was Wilde who first addressed Ada Leverson as the Sphinx. Sally Beauman, I think, worries unduly about this. There were many Sphinxes about in the Nineties. One of them appeared to Richard le Gallienne as he sat in a restaurant eating whitebait, others to Gustave Moreau and to Khnopff. Nor would I agree with ...”

“... the icy lake.’ For this is Chicago 1968, and the boys in the club are getting tanked up for a sally to the Negro quarter to roust up a Negro who has assaulted the Doctor’s daughter, and it is in connection with this that the Doctor wishes that he ‘could say he were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more.’ There are, as these passages may ...”

“... before slitting their throats. ‘There are no second acts in American lives,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald, archetype of the American artist betrayed by the Judas kiss of fame, his early work overpraised, he himself declared a has-been just as he was achieving mastery. No one understood the process better than the author of The Great Gatsby, certainly not ...”

“... old taunt that says, “Get a life,” I can say: “I already have an existence, thanks.”’ Sally Caldwell, his new girlfriend, fits neatly into the Existence Period, being independent, undemanding and, officially, a widow. Frank was at school with Wally, her former husband, whose experiences in Vietnam ‘left him intermittently distracted’, and ...”

“... with impunity to give away the endings of whodunnits. We are told on page 248 who strangled Sally in James’s Cover Her Face (it wasn’t, of course, the loyal housekeeper), and a page later Priestman coolly lets the murderer of A Certain Justice out of the bag. If this kind of thing catches on, one can imagine the Crime Writers Guild threatening to ...”

“... reacting against. It was against characters in books, which formed a convenient target and Aunt Sally, disguising the fact that what she really repudiated was the imaginative and introspective organisation which produced the character as a work of art. ‘If they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to?’ asks Rachel in The Voyage Out. Her ...”

“... of smart private schools, his wardrobe from Brooks Brothers, the names of his girlfriends (Sally Hayes, Jane Gallagher), his dream of running off and living in a little cabin in the West, or at the edge of the woods in Massachusetts or Vermont, all say WASP in a voice with no trace of Jewish New York. When Salinger’s mother peppered the young ...”

“... about Oxford life called Folly Bridge, which starred Jeremy’s cousin and closest confidante, Sally Hinchcliffe (a classics scholar at Somerville), and brought its director and producer scholarships to, respectively, the UCLA film school and IDHEC in Paris. Jeremy later wrote of the script having been produced ‘under ideal working conditions – a ...”