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“... so interesting as the memoir of Margaret Canby, though the years it covers saw the death of Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson’s marriage to and divorce from Mary McCarthy, a new marriage, the first seven years at the New Yorker, the publication of To the Finland Station, Memoirs of Hecate County, The Wound and the Bow, and six other books, to say ...”

“... devastation. Although she had been an adolescent fan-letter writer – to Vincent Benét and to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was later to be one of the many writers hired and sacked on the script of the film – the admired ones’ sage abstention from answering taught her nothing. When Gone with the Wind was published, fan letters arrived in sacks ...”

“... natural tone. He recounts a good deal of literary as well as military life; there are anecdotes of Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Waugh, Greene, Eliot and others. Only Malcolm Muggeridge is given a full, persuasive study, bristling with interest and Mr Powell’s kind of psychological deconstructions, recalling those of the novels (and incidentally his admiration ...”

“... Gath, which gives a devastating picture of thoroughly modern Brethren, modishly referring to Scott Fitzgerald and Pan Am jumbo jets bound for South Korea, slapping God on the back in prayer, competitively singing hymns in alternate lines (gallery v. floor, under-forties v. over-forties), and ‘pretending self-indulgently that if Christ was not ...”

“... pleasure. But Mackenzie’s influence at the time was far greater, and it was international. Both Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson were fascinated by him: the lush vivacity of his prose not only animates the former’s early novels (intended to be ‘intellectual’ like H.G. Wells, ‘and improper like Compton Mackenzie’), but is just as ...”

“... 10 a.m. and then before breakfast. ‘1966: I sit on the terrace reading about the torments of Scott Fitzgerald. I am, he was, one of those men who read the grievous accounts of hard-drinking, self-destructive authors, holding a glass of whisky in our hands, the tears pouring down our cheeks.’ ‘1968: Dear Lord – who else? – keep me away from ...”

“... roll-call of writer-enthusiasts: Horace, Sidney, Marlowe, Byron, Arnold, Brooke, Gide, Scott Fitzgerald and, most recently, Charles Sprawson. It is true, of course, that Vladimir Nabokov was a keen roller-skater back in Berlin in the Twenties. More recently, my own novel The Limits of Vision included an extravagantly irrelevant vignette of a ...”

“... in describing the ambiguous dynamics of his complex, contestful, admiring relationship with Scott Fitzgerald, not the character assassination it is so often taken to be. There is, of course, a problem. Two hundred years ago Rousseau was surely as aware an autobiographer, as conscious of the transformations and deformations wrought by translating ...”

“... to a 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 satisfied with that. In my ...”

“... crowd of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard drinking of the writers around Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Actors were even encouraged in their cups by movie fans. According to the pioneer producer J. Stuart Blackton, ‘Prohibition ... brought about the unique situation of reminiscent and heartfelt applause from the audience ...”

“... and introduces us. Logan Mountstuart – Ernest Hemingway. The pointy-faced man is, inevitably, Scott Fitzgerald; later on, with equal inevitability, a sentence about Tender is the Night is followed by one about jazz. Mountstuart himself, on the other hand, remains strangely insubstantial. He does things and meets people, but it’s hard to get much ...”

“... Thirlwell’s narrator, in other words, badly wants to be the kind of novelist – Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann are among those he quotes, according to the postscript – who could make Literature out of the thin delusions of a reprobate like Haffner. Unless, of course, it is Thirlwell who wants to be that novelist, in which case ...”

“... her tremulous, shy, disingenuous smile and saying Halloo with the dying fall of an F. Scott Fitzgerald chick spinning giddily to hell’. Carter establishes her dirty atmospherics with superb swiftness and confidence – some extravagant and dangerous players, a seedy Gothic neighbourhood both real and set-like. But she seems not to know what ...”

“... in virtue, may get travestied by the inwardly vicious. Everyone also suspects himself, as Scott Fitzgerald noted, of possessing at least one cardinal virtue. Where politicians continually have to flatter a demos that sees them as clay-footed, each citizen, banjaxed and blandished by turns, is apt to divine in himself a moral purity his political ...”

“... on Beckett’s Film, as well as a two-volume work on cinema), on literature (Lewis Carroll, Zola, Scott Fitzgerald, Artaud, Proust, Melville, Whitman, Kafka, Beckett and T.E. Lawrence, among others), and on painting (including an essay on the French artist Gérard Fromanger which likens painting to cookery). He wrote in the preface to Différence et ...”