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“... and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted to read about a doleful scholar with a problematic wife didn’t show up en masse until September, when Viking also published Saul Bellow’s Herzog. In February 1966, however, an appreciation by Irving Howe of Williams’s ‘serious, beautiful and affecting ...”

“... in the Sixties – which he does with considerable confidence and resource. But when the book is read, one does not feel that a synoptic view of a century’s artistic activity has been recorded: the Lamberts were, after all, marginal figures – over-talented de-spoilers of their own talent. Their achievements look smaller with the lapse of time, and if it ...”

“... Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.’ The article was such a crunchy read, so stuffed with only-in-Hollywood anecdotes and luxury shopping specifics, that it upstaged the movie before its release. Sometimes with a Troubled Production, miracles happen in the editing suite, but this wasn’t one of those times. (‘The Canyons is ...”

“... crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.’ Quentin Tarantino cited Willeford as one of the major influences on Pulp Fiction. There can be something a little suspect about being so well respected by fellow practitioners: the appeal may ...”

“... was ‘thrilled by the brilliance of Israel’s military achievement’, as he said in his recent Leonard Stein lectures, in which he went on to describe his subsequent disillusionment. Tony Judt is now an incisive critic of Israeli policy but as a youthful Zionist he flew out to help the Jewish state during the war, and remembers – this by way of contrast ...”

“... a brief stint as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture ...”

“... pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to reading 21 books of the length of Ulysses.’ Attempting to honour modernism’s internationalist ambition makes the task even more onerous, as every country sprouted its own magazines. A synoptic view of the modernist little magazine ...”

“... and celebrated by such admirers as Ernest Hemingway: ‘When the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened,’ Hemingway announced in 1938. But nothing compared with the rage and opprobrium that followed the publication of his Castro interview. Colleagues shunned him; the FBI investigated him; congressional ...”

“... of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which – apart from Abe Brumberg’s ...”

“... morning/Is different, my dear one’), and another is so-so, but some time in the 1970s, having read Auden’s City Without Walls, Grigson wrote an Epistle in which he excelled himself: Green pillows of cress In the brook which begins us You celebrate too; And up from your verses, Though many Forget them, stinking Ogres not ...”

“... expertise in different ways: sometimes friends tell me what the latest scoop is; sometimes I read about it in the papers; sometimes I hear about it from official pronouncements, governmental and professional; sometimes – and this tends to work on me – I encounter expertise face-to-face in a doctor’s surgery when I’m feeling more vulnerable than ...”

“... more than half a century earlier. Homosexual acts had just been decriminalised (although Grant read the manuscript before that happened and asked: ‘Shall I be arrested?’), but it was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of ...”

“... dozen programmes are alone worth the licence fee.27 July. A flying visit to Norfolk, where I am to read at the Holt Festival. Rather than hang about all morning R. sensibly gets us off to look at two churches at Warham, both medieval but with one done up in the 18th century. As we look round the first church (which has three fonts) there is some sort of ...”

“... odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after all, was the logical outcome of her loyalty to those beliefs, and to the people and events that marked her ...”

“... drinking himself into sullenness and nausea, about his or her appeals for sympathy and advice from Leonard and Virginia Woolf or Ottoline Morrell, or one or another of the Sitwells or Geoffrey Faber and his wife. Anyone who reads even a portion of this material is bound to wonder how the Eliots managed to stay together as long as they did, and how they ...”