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“... gives it in life; 19th-century French novelists dwelled on it in great detail, US novelists like Tom Wolfe still do. But Houellebecq doesn’t follow through, and we never understand why these bursts of financial detail come and go. To provoke the Left? To emphasise the shallowness of Western society? As part of some grand pastiche of airport fiction to ...”

“... it is translated into a set of symbolic tokens. In Radical Chic and MauMauing the Flak-Catchers, Tom Wolfe has described how Californian administrators were exposed to ‘Mau-Mauing’, a mock-demonstration held far away from the ghetto audience but within reach of a City Hall which was to give money in aid. And Murray Edelman, in a book entitled ...”

“... the century – or at any rate its middle years. Johnson was also the architect of the space age: Tom Wolfe correctly makes him a central figure in The Right Stuff and it’s no accident that mission control is anchored in Houston. With the Great Society programme he forced a torrent of social and economic reforms through Congress – only FDR did ...”

“... after 11 September it was the unimaginable v. the imagination. Now, again (the last time it was Tom Wolfe decrying his fellow American novelists for not reporting), it is the social v. the aesthetic, as if the aesthetic was something stable and unchanged by society, as if, indeed, the aesthetic were not constantly refracted and transformed by the ...”

“... by David Brooks, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and blurbed by the usual suspects from Tom Wolfe to Christopher Buckley, it is entitled Bobos in Paradise – Bobos for ‘bourgeois bohemians’.* Its argument, which confuses cappuccino with bohemia and a pension-plan invested in money-markets with a political sell-out, is as follows: Marx ...”

“... to break the sound barrier, in the experimental rocket-powered X-1. (As indelibly recorded by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, Yeager was a pilot of the old school, who trusted his instincts: he scoffed at the engineers who were concerned that at speeds greater than Mach 1 the plane might stop working aerodynamically altogether and fall out of the ...”

“... kind of Pop prose, which, even as it resembled the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and others, also recalled the rambunctious mix-and-match of images and ideas in the IG, with a lingo that is excessively mimetic of a brash consumerscape of bright but broken surfaces. In this light Hamilton and Banham were madder men than any ...”

“... hundred other ways it is more so – more explicit, direct, propositional. In Chapter 6 of Gatsby Tom Buchanan and two friends ride up to Gatsby’s house on horseback, are served drinks, then rudely abandon him before he can join them for dinner: ‘they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light ...”

“... scored for speech: hysterical italics, the incontinent stutter of periods (...) that derive from Tom Wolfe, not from Céline. The apologetic language droppings (‘pardonnez-moi’) and compulsive Americanisms (‘rimshot time in Vegas’). The temptation with this fast-food prose (‘People don’t drop their haitches, they drops Es’) is to become a ...”

“... relationship’ (chosen to give evidence, along with William F. Buckley, from a list that included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Victor Navasky), said that a writer was always wholly justified in being untrue in his relationship with a subject. Here is how the exchange went in court: Q: Is there a custom or practice in the literary world about whether or ...”

“... cassette player’. Typographical tricks suit satirists such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who seem to be graffiti-spraying billboards with impudent brio, deploying jazzy effects (italics, caps, boldface, exclamation marks, dashes) to fill a wide canvas. They’re performance artists in print. Pynchon, too. Moody is more of a heartbreak ...”

“... it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet again. ‘Romantic Ireland’ was not ‘dead ...”

“... labels began commissioning long disco mixes not from the artists themselves but from DJs like Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. Many of the successful DJ remixes in this era were relentlessly percussive, often incorporating salsa or African rhythms. Ironically, the longer mixes were rarely played in full: DJs using two copies of the record would just repeat ...”

“... least truthful book. But it is a very good one, and it may be the high point of the thing Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism. Capote did not invent it. There were already a fair number of good writers, sound listeners, who were into that sort of concentrated, high-style reportage. Anyhow, the best claim of responsibility for its American ...”

“... black populism and demagogy in New York and Chicago – which have been more cheaply annexed by Tom Wolfe but which found an outlet also in Mr Sammler’s Planet. In Ravelstein he presents the Jewish experience principally and unexceptionably as one of survival. With a tinge of self-pity, though, he also advances it as something that non-Jews can’t ...”