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“... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign author, like ...”

“... a year and a half he would stand with his bottle and dance to the rhythm of the washing-machine. Joseph, his father, was angry and ambitious, an excellent if often sorry combination in the parent of a child who wants to be successful in showbusiness. Everything that is bad for a child might be good for a performer – including, I suspect, being locked in a ...”

“... to him was a tuxedoed man pumping his fists at Trump’s every line to lead the cheering throng. Joseph ‘Joey No Socks’ Cinque is a former associate of the Gambino family boss John Gotti who was convicted in 1989 for possession of stolen artworks including a couple of $20,000 Chagall prints and a Miró. (The New York district attorney’s office withdrew ...”

“... an ophthalmologist, based Holmes’s deductive abilities on those of a real doctor, the surgeon Joseph Bell.) Nonetheless, the hero-in-two-persons arrangement is vestigially present in many cyclically narrated comics. Probably the best-loved example is the duality of Snoopy and Charlie Brown. Snoopy, the romantic ‘hero’, is variously an attorney, a pulp ...”

“... an excited neediness for supra-human entitlement. There was a great deal of clapping as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger offered his words of appreciation to the dead pontiff. Clapping is the way it is always done nowadays, clapping in church, clapping by roadsides, as if a surge of assent had no outlet bar through the palms. What is a saint these days but a ...”

“... to look Jewish when he takes to wearing glasses. It’s a powerful piece and in retrospect rather Roth-like. No one quite says how much of his street cred came from his marriage to Monroe, though paradoxically more with the intellectuals than with Hollywood. 21 February. Snow arrives on cue around four but alas doesn’t lay; ‘It’s laying!’ one of the ...”

“... the ‘“surprising point of view” trick’ also has a long pre-Jamesian history. To quote Joseph Addison’s ‘Adventures of a Shilling’ (1710), ‘I was born on the side of a mountain, near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake’; the shilling’s later adventures include being ...”

“... others owned by men of wealth and influence – but not the hundred-acre farms of men like James Roth, whose best land was bisected and paved over. The same outlook shaded into distaste for the people his projects were supposed to serve. As Frances Perkins said, ‘He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great ...”

“... tradition was not extinguished, but still capable of a remarkable reassertion, was shown by Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, which appeared in 1932. This great novel, which Lukács came to admire, answers to all his criteria save one, which it pointedly reverses. Lukács believed that the true historical novel was carried by a sense of ...”

“... mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ill-starred ...”

“... sessions, Sontag was not monastic and solo piloting, sequestered at her desk like Philip Roth with only a photograph of Kafka for company. Moser reiterates what memoirists such as Sigrid Nunez (Sempre Susan), Phillip Lopate (Notes on Sontag), Edmund White (City Boy), Gary Indiana (Utopia’s Debris) and others recorded first-hand: that Sontag was ...”

“... and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano, or crypto ...”