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“... which is very much a matter of textual resistance, in particular to Conrad and to Cary’s Mister Johnson: ‘One big message I try to put across is that Africa was not a vacuum before the coming of Europe, that culture was not brought to Africa by the white world … We too had our history, traditions, cultures, civilisations.’ Achebe is not without his ...”

“... Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff ...”

“... melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his ...”

“... into Beaumarchais; who turns into Mozart; who turns into Rossini. He also turns into Proust and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov, and thus an essential part of our own literature. Instead of writing a book nobody would remember, because as Dr Johnson said nothing so odd can live long, he became the source of a whole tradition ...”

“... Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.’ How is Amis getting on in this notional academy? In 1986, with ...”

“... hats would find its way into Finnegans Wake, according to Thornton Wilder, a formidable scholar of Joyce. ‘This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down in the living detch.’ When told of the homage in later years, Groucho was well pleased and only a little sceptical. ‘Did a New York policeman, on his way back to Ireland to see his dear old Mother ...”

“... Che Guevara – More sexy your neck than sad aging necks of                   Johnson                De Gaulle, Kosygin, or the bullet pierced neck of John Kennedy – these poems tell you how it was, I suppose. Beyond that, they show what is wrong with the American Romanticism they proclaim, and not what is right with ...”

“... of how it all was. Though filled with the noise of coffee-houses, and café society, The Life of Johnson is an oral biography of a quite different sort – and Boswell a sharper prism than any other biographer – but there is nevertheless something pleasingly Boswellian in Plimpton’s arrangements. He, too, has a subject who suits the gossipy method, and ...”

“... some party games, whispering to the English guests that they must let the Germans win. The actress Joyce Grenfell, who was Astor’s niece and a connoisseur of Nancy’s humour, was there: What do you suppose Aunt N did after dinner? Made us all play musical chairs. She really is a remarkable woman, for who else could think of such a thing? Some of the older ...”

“... for which the extreme conservatives are hoping. Why do you think that Peregrine Worsthorne, Paul Johnson and Auberon Waugh are, pro tem, in favour of the mosque against secular, brown activists of the Rushdie type? It is depressing to notice how much of the commentary in this matter depends on the unstated false antithesis between ‘the West’ and ...”

“... need for icons, and this is what has led so many parts to be scripted for Wilson – the modern Dr Johnson, the American Sainte-Beuve, the last of the men of letters, the man who read everything. There is something about the surviving pictures of Wilson that uncannily colludes with this process: the stubby, solid figure, with its big head and staring eyes, as ...”

“... occasions of which this is not true.)’ In the jacket photograph she was decked out as James Joyce, with a felt-tip monocle over one eye. ‘The picture of you on the back rather turns my head,’ Murdoch wrote. ‘You dazzling creature.’ (Years later, she tried a new tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first book of ...”

“... romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He often remarked – it was one of his most characteristic sayings – that with any writer of significance, even the greatest, you always had to put up with something. In the case of ...”

“... but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and ...”

“... Nor was the father a tyrant; he introduced his son to the works of Hardy and, more surprisingly, Joyce, did not regard jazz as the work of the devil, bought him a subscription to the magazine Downbeat (a signpost here) and also helped him invest in a drum-kit. What if anything he bought his daughter Kitty and what Mrs Larkin thought of it all is not ...”