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“... 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. Later he recruited her as a member of the small rotating committee of friends, an editorial micro-minyan, to whom he sent drafts of his books ...”

“... icons or paintings of bearded priests and plump-looking men with heavy black moustaches who kept a stern eye on me as I poked around. There were also old books and magazines in many languages. These were educated people who had attended schools abroad but whose families had long since gone broke and were at the point of extinction. Those stuffy apartments came ...”

“... in Britain’. The press’s list would include the poetry of Kurt Schwitters and Anatol Stern, Apollinaire’s calligrammes and the Pataphysics of Jean-Hugues Sainmont, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, and Song of Bright Misery by Pol-Dives, the Parisian artist in whose home Stefan had hidden from the Nazis in 1940. Publishing a roster of ...”

“... an extract from Wesker’s The Kitchen. Less emblematic but equally germane is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are ...”

“... by learning and by virtue’.Nine years later, in Johnson’s Idler, criticism is no longer a stern or remote celestial being, but ‘a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, who will meet the slow and encourage the timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.’ This beguiling ...”

“... It would help if he was writing The Big Sleep, as he was late in that year: the sunny patio begets Philip Marlow’s dusty office and his mean, incomprehensible streets, another California. The legend has faded now – fortunately, since it did so much damage, and not only to famous sad cases – but it is important to understand its terrible appeal. Just ...”

“... me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early days of Beyond the Fringe in 1961. It was a Philip Webb building (date: 1862) with a workshop on the ground floor and accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having ...”

“... of Great White 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 ...”

“... trump the video-recorder.Perhaps sailing takes the palm: you can photograph an angry sea from the stern of a cross-channel ferry, but I imagine it looks very different from the deck of a yacht. So it is with flying gliders: I can show you an aerial photograph of a cumulus cloud and it will remind you of your last holiday – ten minutes after take-off from ...”

“... direction – picturesqueness, psychological embellishment, provision of thrills. You choke, as Philip Larkin has put it in a poem, on such nutritious images. Angela Carter, however, has things well in hand in the radio adaptation. Perhaps this is simply explained. In an introduction to the book, she describes herself as ‘a child of the Radio Age’, and ...”

“... Among the terms of abuse which J.R.R. Tolkien was accustomed to apply to an Oxford college of which he was (and I am) a member, there is one that makes an odd impression. It is the adjective ‘medieval’, pointedly used in its pejorative sense by this philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon. As Anglo-Saxon scholar and philologist Tolkien is not remembered by the world at large, although this is the aspect of his work that W ...”

“... And yet Connolly’s reputation is probably as high as it has ever been. Nice one, to be sure. Philip Larkin once wrote that Connolly was ‘at his best when able to assimilate his subject into the scenario of his own temperament’. But for connolly such assimilation was compulsive. Almost everything he wrote was touched with woe-begone ...”

“... housewife and mother, who chants the Koran in Arabic, a language she doesn’t know, and whose stern prohibitions, emerging from a profound fear of the outside world, have damaged many lives, including her own children’s. Here, Aslam describes her laboriously picking up the prayer beads she scattered when she slapped her daughter during an ...”

“... looked capable of being nutmegged by a beachball.’ Of course that was twenty years ago, before stern charity and moderation of language became the name of the game. Amis likes games and seems especially keen on tennis and poker, but he spends more time on chess. He does what might by some be described as a ‘splendid job’ on Bobby Fischer, and a genial ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”