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“... After​ reading all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in 1945, Edmund Wilson concluded that there was nothing scary about stories full of words like ‘eerie’, ‘unhallowed’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘infernal’, ‘hellish’ and ‘unholy’, especially when these refer to an ‘invisible whistling octopus’ (the creature appears at the end of the 1928 story ‘The Call of Cthulhu ...”

“... want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you ...”

“... the opening issue of the newly revived Partisan Review in 1937 in front of contributions from Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and even Picasso, has an intensity that seems both unique to Schwartz and bound up with its own moment of composition. There is nothing in it from which one might learn how to compose short stories, or how to achieve certain ...”

“... City, but not the last volume. He’s rewriting his own history. Apparently he didn’t even know Edmund Wilson all that well, and I don’t think Wilson much liked him.’ He said he’d read Wilson’s letters straight through, liked them very much, but still didn’t know why ...”

“... of going too much for the ‘psychological’ reading of James’s tale, most famously advanced by Edmund Wilson: there are no ghosts, it’s all in the governess’s mind. She has been sent down to the country mansion to look after two small orphans, she is frightened and sex-starved, she starts imagining things, in particular that a former governess and ...”

“... farouche boy poet, Rimbaud, although few homosexual liaisons in history are more celebrated – as Edmund Wilson pointed out in a severely critical piece in the New Yorker in 1944. But, apart from the disadvantage of sexual deviation, Harold Nicolson lacked the decisiveness, the hardness and the ruthlessness of the successful public man. He had too many ...”

“... and recitations, and had made a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still ...”

“... the States) dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Arguing against Edmund Wilson and his psychobiographer followers, Wills denies that Lincoln entertained a parricidal wish for political immortality. He was driven by no desire to slay and surpass the Revolutionary fathers, to create an imperial Presidency presiding over a ...”

“... pyramid of skulls but who would be bothered? ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ shouted Edmund Wilson, exasperated, but it would barely be a mutter today. For who, sleepless in the guest bedroom in even the dankest of shires, is going to pounce gleefully upon Freeman Wills Crofts? But in 1930 – name to conjure with. Does a name survive of ...”

“... of this genre. His books lack the pacing of bestsellers or the detail of many police procedurals. Edmund Wilson was dismissive of mysteries precisely because he found their solutions ‘neither interesting nor plausible enough’. But the atmosphere Wilson admired in Raymond Chandler’s books is present too in Qiu’s ...”

“... Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession ...”

“... once the problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd afterwards – but good examples of the form have other attractions. They usually seem to owe their durability to elements in them that are gratuitous, strictly speaking. The sleuths don’t ...”

“... a recent book by the American philosopher Russell Jacoby, laments the disappearance of the Edmund Wilson. Randolph Bourne, Mary McCarthy type of literary intellectual, who addressed a large audience from positions of institutional independence and serious cultural engagement. Today, according to Jacoby, whose book has been much celebrated by the ...”

“... that Quint on the tower is far, up, out, cut, detailed, framed. And that, it seems, is that. Even Edmund Wilson in his clumsy Freudian interpretation did make some use of his observation that the male ghost appeared on a tower, the female by a lake. The interesting element for anyone with a taste for these things (and Professor Brooke-Rose’s tolerance ...”

“... me sometimes with his anti-semitism and childish fascism that I cannot write to him’. When Edmund Wilson wanted to republish some early letters of mine I made him change ‘Jews’ to ‘New York people’ in the text. What more can a man do? At the same time I supported Ezra’s release from the nuthouse, for impeccable reasons, and gifted him ...”