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“... But the response seems too blunt and broad for that – too blunt and broad for either Gatsby or Fitzgerald. If Gatsby were at all given to making jokes, we might think this was one. There is an American myth, Fitzgerald’s myth, in which the West and the Middle West are one: they are not-the-East. The East is New York ...”

“... muttering in the shadows behind Kennaway’s prose, and they are the Old Firm of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You can hear Hemingway grumbling in the rhythm of the faux-naif opening; it could be Colonel Cantwell muttering to himself as he walks through the fish-market of Venice. You can hear the echo of ...”

“... this book so enticing. It was inevitable, given his background, that he would be drawn to Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist for whom Hollywood was the nemesis he needed. You understand that, no matter the phantom of success and splendour that Fitzgerald endured, his destiny was the swimming pool that awaits Gatsby, or the ...”

“... latter always be accepted as the truth? Or when Hemingway writes (in A Moveable Feast) that Scott Fitzgerald admitted to having been a virgin before he married Zelda, and the English actress Rosalinde Fuller writes that, on the contrary, she had a passionate affair with Fitzgerald before ...”

“... the Civil War, while Europe had to wait for the industrial impetus of the 1914 conflict. As Scott Fitzgerald wisely observed, culture follows money, so by the time he was enjoying the Twenties and dunking Zelda in the Plaza fountain New York was where it was at. Manhattan is not New York, and New York, as people fall asleep ...”

“... personal anecdote, and then back to literature: In a famous episode of A Moveable Feast, F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses concern about the size of his penis, Zelda having said it was inadequately small; and Hemingway suggests he compare himself with what is to be found on classical statues, saying that most men would be ...”

“... the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated pagan sense tiresome and offensive ...”

“... the heavens and the earth and the film stars we’d do with a chance.’ Then there’s Scott Fitzgerald: ‘know that I must drop the F. Think American twenties just divine and I’d be Zelda if I could. Think suffering’s worth it. To be mad a fine exciting thing to be for those short times in those mad ...”

“... her. ‘The most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her,’ Scott Fitzgerald once remarked of his wife, ‘has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness of Zelda.’ Perhaps there is something unfailingly attractive about pretty women whose self-absorption makes them unable to cope ...”

“... childish. ‘There is something unfinished,’ she complains, ‘about the clothes that F. Scott Fitzgerald dresses his heroines in . . . Maybe he saw it as a mark of his masculinity to leave out the details . . . Surely Zelda would have told us these things?’ That the revelation or otherwise of detail might be an ...”