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“... but ‘despite these clever rejiggings, Hergé’s sense of guilt keeps pulsing through’, as Tom McCarthy has written. Trying to sidestep openly racist or anti-Semitic feelings, Roberto Rastapopoulos, Marquis di Gorgonzola, is strongly coloured Italian and Greek, but these handles of the comic villain serve as a form of disguise, adopted by a ...”

“... these characters are well-heeled, one of the book’s main themes is redundancy. Many people in Tom’s circle have become redundant, either because they have lost their jobs or because they simply are, as persons, superfluous; and now he himself is a redundant movie director. Film, however spurious, is life: acting, however talented, is a form of ...”

“... to explosive behaviour, even when summoned to Washington to account for his radical past by Joe McCarthy, and taunted and grilled by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, in March 1953. The transcripts of those sessions, declassified in 2003, present a battle of wits, as Hughes ducks or deflects or refutes Cohn’s ...”

“... and self-conscious personality. All we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.’ In The Manchurian Candidate it takes the diabolical Yen Lo (played winningly by Khigh Dheigh), the wisecracking savant of the Pavlov Institute, only one ...”

“... else could have driven them to their 2004 remake of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers? Even if Tom Hanks is funnier in that film than our idea of Tom Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen ...”

“... 1991 may not have fundamentally altered the character of the sport – a quarter of a century ago, Tom Stoppard was making a character in his play Professional Foul complain about the ‘yob ethics’ of the game – but they have made it worse. The players are richer, greedier and nastier, and almost mystically free from any sense of wider perspectives and ...”

“... in his 1993 afterword mentions Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Finnegans Wake and Moby-Dick; Tom McCarthy in his new introduction invokes Döblin, Laforgue, Plato, Shakespeare, Derrida, Bataille and Adorno. Sensibly neither makes reference to Gide’s The Counterfeiters, published in 1925, whose handling of the themes of originality and authenticity ...”

“... apparatus is probably beyond the capabilities of psychiatric case study. Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy might have had a better shot at evoking what makes Rudy tick, much as Mailer examined the biomechanics of the ‘New Nixon’ in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and McCarthy taxonomised the cast of Watergate in The Mask ...”

“... the closest model for a belletrist sans merci was the critic, novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made ...”

“... the US, with the essays, novels and Homage to Catalonia carried along in their wake. The publisher Tom Rosenthal, totting up the royalties earned during six months by a backlist of Seeker foreign authors including Mishima, Moravia, Svevo, Gide, Colette, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Grass, Böll and half a dozen others, found that the whole lot added up to half ...”

“... characters at social events on Morningside Heights: Diana and Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald – all of them brilliant, feisty, friendly and endlessly voluble. Some of their hangers-on were third-rate intellectual goons like Arnold Beichmann (former Communist, rabid anti-Communist, now an aged relic of the Hoover ...”

“... Tom Wolfe’s earlier squib against Modernism, The Painted Word, was a reasonable succès de scandale among those with enough interest in the New York School of painting to want to defend it, but went little further than that. From Bauhaus to Our House, on the other hand, has achieved the unprecedented feat (in architectural publishing) of making its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller lists, along with all those diets, cats and Barbara Cartland ...”

“... Night a Traveller), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and, later, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Tom McCarthy.† In 2001 he published a sort of spy-thriller, a nouveau nouveau roman set in a ravaged postwar Berlin, but its title, La Reprise – ‘resumption’, ‘repetition’, even ‘rerun’ – captured all too well the experience of reading ...”

“... age of the war correspondent as buccaneer. Although he was not at all his way inclined, it was Tom Driberg who described him (perhaps unguardedly) as ‘a trim, slight figure, dark and jaunty, with steady eyes, a scornful passionate lip and a certain ruthless charm’. Interestingly, his appeal was not universal, even among newspapermen. When he worked ...”

“... a brilliant article in the Spectator (which I then owned), Anthony West, after depicting Senator McCarthy’s activities in America and exposing the potentialities for nonsense (still with us) in the concept of security risks, showed that it was ‘this game’ that Harold Wilson, George Wigg (‘that industrious garbage collector’), Dick Crossman and ...”