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“... cover depicting Marilyn Monroe mussing his hair had cost him his.)Roth’s first choice was Ross Miller, a friend, professor at the University of Connecticut and nephew of the playwright Arthur Miller. Unfortunately, the neph was no chip off the old oak. Hapless is perhaps the kindest word. A workhorse like Roth could only ...”

“... the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of his latest openings. Benevolent, even comradely in a Jewish-1915 way, but would never think of saying a word, asking a word, about anyone else’s work … Caroline Kennedy (Schlossberg) was there. The ...”

“... New Left Review Benedict Anderson made sharp criticisms of the work of the journalist and poet James Fenton in which a comparison with that of Kapuściński was noted: you were left with the sense of two talented crisis-fancying literary tourists. Kapuściński exercises a personal charm which must have helped him to establish friendly relations with the ...”

“... every single gay male novelist (those two do almost every female), I planned to work on Henry James alone. James, for me, came after Proust. And he wrote in English. There was just one problem. My grades were fine. My GREs were fine, though I hadn’t been able to identify the line ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard ...”

“... printed works, on occasion, for various reasons. No novelist has made such a job of it as Henry James. In July 1905 he began the task of revising his life’s work, in order to create a final statement, a complete collection of his works, called from its inception the New York Edition. James actually believed that this ...”

“... he will keep peeing in wicked places. The sequences featuring three eventually famous friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure ...”

“... In 1978 a rejected lover got a nice blaze going on the second floor when she set light to her ex’s clothes. There was the usual ruckus but only one death: the building was designed to limit the spread of fire. Earlier, in 1971, an older resident had fallen asleep, leaving food on a hotplate. She died, but a gaggle of regulars lived to tell the tale as ...”

“... but the puffs of smoke have yet to ascend from the City of London. Habemus Papam. His Holiness James Kelman? That would be a turn-up for the Booker. I would imagine that Sister Margaret Atwood, or Brother Banville, is more likely to win the prize. On the short list is Rose Tremain, who teaches at the University of East Anglia. Two of the judges are ...”

“... the point here. It was a very rich tradition, this ‘Frenchness’, within which Ford and Henry James and Conrad worked. And one strand of it came from Balzac. I refer to the theme of the Lamb thrown to the Wolves: the spectacle, implacably presented by the novelist, of innocence cast to its devourers amid the total misunderstanding of motives and with no ...”

“... Davies? Oh, he was a sort of natural, wasn’t he – like Clare?’ James Reeves’s Introduction to his Penguin anthology of Georgian poetry puts this absentminded question into the mouth of an unidentified intellectual of recent times. It refers to the author of the present book, who is also the author of the once-famous Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and of some six hundred poems ...”

“... to fresh troubles – until the time came for a genocidal pacification, ordered by none other than James I, and Armstrong said his last good night. Nationality counted for very little, compared with family. Perpetually at feud among themselves, a community of predator victims straddled the frontier, as did a population of the defenceless: ‘The poor and those ...”

“... pleasure dome of the permissive society, designed this ‘pandaemonium’. Norman Mailer and James Baldwin made things worse by recommending violence. And Noam Chomsky had the nerve to protest against the violence of America in Vietnam. Paul Johnson’s is a forceful and funny book; even those who don’t like it could well enjoy it, for the most ...”

“... both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our ...”

“... Fanny has had a long gestation. In 1961, as an undergraduate, she was taught by the late Professor James L. Clifford, Johnson’s biographer, who had the admirable policy of inviting his class to imitate an 18th-century author instead of writing yet another academic paper on him. At the time, Ms Jong came up with a mock epic in heroic couplets in the manner of ...”

“... voice in their writing was a secret between the work and its readers. We don’t know what Henry James sounded like, and that is part of the mystery we enjoy. So much so that hearing the actual voices of dead writers can come as a shock. The British Library has decided, most pleasingly, to begin trading in that kind of shock, with the issue of a bunch of ...”