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“... The plot​ sounds like Joseph Roth at his most cynically extravagant: a demobbed soldier, down on his luck, has a chance meeting with a political agitator on the rise, and the two forge an alliance that propels the soldier onto the world stage. He marries a rich American opera singer, governs an African colony, conducts an epic legal battle with the Vatican, embroils himself in the darkest villainies of his exceptionally brutal era, is executed multiple times without realising it, and ends his days on an island in the Mediterranean ...”

“... the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip ...”

“... Claudia Roth Pierpont met Philip Roth at a birthday party in 2002. She was a fan, but managed not to alienate him with clumsy enthusiasm. A couple of years later he sent her a photocopy of a newspaper article he thought she might be interested in. They met for coffee and became more relaxed with each other ...”

“... not cool enough, or edgy enough, their delight in the ridiculous is too obvious. When Tim Roth, as the cop in Reservoir Dogs, explains to his mentor that the diamond-heist gang have code-names based on colours, and he is Mr Orange, his mentor repeats the name before his next speech – this is not in the screenplay – and can’t help ...”

“... place of obligation. Sometimes the two merge, as in the case of the Jewish Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth, who ended up broke in Paris, mourning the dissolution of ‘my fatherland, the only one I have ever had’. ‘His birthplace had been ceded to Poland,’ writes Michael Hofmann, ‘his country – the supranational Dual Monarchy comprising 17 ...”

“... the contingency that Cesarani and most other historians today rightly insist on, some people – Joseph Roth, for example – saw with brutal clarity what the abandonment of thought meant. In ‘The Auto-da-fé of the Mind’, Roth writes:Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third ...”

“... Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t ...”

“... of the Habsburg Emperors, did the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Emperor at the time was Franz Joseph and that comes into it too, for here is Franz K writing about Joseph K in the time of Franz Joseph K. There was another emperor nearer at hand, the emperor in the armchair, Kafka’s ...”

“... Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend ...”

“... are given to seeking out images of violence and coercion: an excellent recent article by Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker was entitled ‘The Rage of Aphrodite’. Her prose is collected under the rubric A Captive Spirit; her best translator, Elaine Feinstein, took a line of hers, ‘A captive lion’, as the title of a fine biography. Tsvetaeva wrote ...”

“... or a bear or a moose appears. The dolphins sometimes kill celebrities, Sean Penn and Philip Roth as well as Elijah Wood. Eeeee Eee Eeee seems vaguely adolescent; its ideal reader is probably 18 or 19 years old. (The New York Public Library shelves the book in the ‘Young Adult’ section.) And its long closing scene, in which the unnamed president of ...”

“... is that ‘writing is never spontaneous.’ So too, as he pointed out in an interview with Philip Roth, the truth told in The Truce is ‘filtered truth’, each episode having been ‘preceded by countless verbal versions’ and retouchings as it was recounted by Levi to his friends and family. Levi’s writing about the Holocaust and its aftermath, in other ...”

“... he adored cats and dogs and cows and horses, but his friend, agent and German translator, Susanna Roth, is certain that he meant to end his own life, and dismisses attempts to repurpose his death (often by the same people who had stifled his surly life and enchanting work). ‘Bohumil Hrabal did not die tragically,’ she writes in her 2001 memoir of ...”

“... of the time. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, suggested she’d been steeping in Bellow and Roth. To Wood, she still sounded too much like Wallace, and his review, in this paper, was harsh enough (‘disturbingly mutant’, he said of the way she wrote like a Yank) to prompt a group of American writers to start a magazine, the Believer, devoted to ...”

“... an impressive roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for literary ...”