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“... of Sartre and Camus, and before the Sixties became the Sixties. William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Pynchon, who else? Oë wrote his graduation thesis on Sartre (in 1959), and evokes Camus in Hiroshima Notes: ‘A plague that ravages a city in North Africa, for example, appears as an abnormal phenomenon; but the doctors and ...”

“... as her study shows, it becomes a reality of its own. ‘Inspiration contained a death threat,’ Saul Bellow said in his introduction to John Berryman’s novel Recovery. ‘He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity.’ But ...”

“... of the recordings take the form of interviews, and the presenters don’t make matters any easier; John Lehmann, for example, speaks to Aldous Huxley as if he were questioning him with a view to offering him something at the Foreign Office. Which just goes to show that broadcasting vices existed long before the days of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. None of ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... I once had the luck to meet the great Saul Bellow, who in the course of the evening told me the following story. In 1945 he had been engaged as a book reviewer for Henry Luce’ Time magazine. Or he thought he had been so engaged. When he turned up for work, he was informed that Whittaker Chambers, chief Pooh-Bah of the ‘back of the book’, wished to see him ...”

“... Harry Fonstein, one of the four main characters in The Bellarosa Connection, is a now-prosperous American-Jewish businessman who was saved from a Fascist prison and smuggled to America by Mafia types acting at the behest of Billy Rose, the famous Jewish showbiz figure (‘Damon Runyon’s pal’) whom he had never met. This is Harry: Fonstein’s type was edel – well-bred – but he also was a tough Jew ...”

“... will triumph over evil in the end: ‘those who think they are privy to God’s word – Joseph, Saul, David ... have to learn that this is not the case: no one is privy to it, not even the reader himself. The narrative refuses its comforts to Joseph, to David, to Jesus, and to us.’ This theme is continued in the chapter ‘Dialogue and Distance’. Like ...”

“... Kings, of young Scorp Murtlock, the wizard of adversary culture in Hearing secret harmonies, Saul Henchman is a man of the Will. It is a category which has always exercised attraction for Powell, and offers his art possibilities of exploiting whatever is at once impressive, comic and sinister in human psychology. It can also be handled by different ...”

“... Martianism was about can be found on the back cover of Reid’s first collection, Arcadia, where Saul Steinberg is approvingly quoted: ‘We spend almost our whole lives reading boisterous, ready-made messages (the mail, the newspapers, traffic-lights). To decipher the other kind of messages requires an effort that renders life rich, gay and, so to ...”

“... the book’s admirers enjoy but which strikes some readers as unconvincing, even hysterical. (Saul Bellow, that other great Russo-American writer, observes somewhere that memory can be a form of hysteria.) These ideas about the paramountcy of structure dominate Nabokov’s explicit aesthetics, to an extent that can make his writings about ...”

“... agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, his great friend, Julian Barnes; the near-death of his mentor Saul Bellow; the discovery that his maternal cousin Lucy Partington, missing since she disappeared without trace in December 1973, had been one of the victims of Fred West. To contemplate this sequence is to see how it might well have needed expression in ...”

“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present America.’ This was John Updike in 1961, saying of J.D. Salinger what critics since have been saying of John Updike: that here is a novelist uncannily responsive to the ‘personality’, if we can use the word, of his own culture. Updike, it has ...”

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... George V, to acquaint him, during the procession, ‘with its constantly repeated Dead March from Saul and Chopin’s Funeral March, each of which I took to my heart’: and the procession became ‘the most impressive part of the funeral’. I have no doubt that if Lord Harewood had grown up in a normal environment, he would, as a matter of course, have ...”