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“... and old-fashioned time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes ...”

“... in the 1990s to the recently finished Succession. Bob Odenkirk, who played the bent lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and the spin-off Better Call Saul, prepared for the role by listening to Evans reading an audiobook of his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Christina Wayne, who as a production executive ...”

“... for class insecurity. This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older ...”

“... a bad light really any more unexpected than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”

“... reading into a usable past, to choose the literary company you seek to join, or to beat. A writer, Saul Bellow said, is a reader moved to emulation. The question is not whether to imitate, but what to imitate and how.But you don’t need to apply much pressure to these claims to see that the matter isn’t straightforward. When writers imitate, what do they ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no ...”

“... to photograph celebrities, very few of the resulting pictures really worked. On the other hand, as John Berendt, who commissioned her for Esquire noted, ‘her eyes would light up at the mere suggestion of oddity, deformity, depravity.’ When the Sunday Times magazine in London tried to interest her in taking pictures of terminally ill patients in a ...”

“... and the Chancellor incident of July 1982 stands as something of a monument to the process. John Chancellor is a leading American television commentator who arrived in Beirut during the siege and witnessed the destruction brought about by the indiscriminate bombing that was taking place all around him. The report he produced in full view of a vast ...”

“... More important, these large claims have been enthusiastically endorsed by Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Lucy Dawidowicz, Arthur Goldberg and many others, and by sundry American newspapers and periodicals, including the Washington Post, Commentary and the New Republic. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein has described the book as one ‘of the most ...”

“... faint aftershock of someone else’s forbidden pleasure. Herschel Shawmut, maudit monologist of Saul Bellow’s story ‘Him with His Foot in His Mouth’, describes the impulse to speak his mind as ‘seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum, divine madness, or even solar storm’. Haunted in old age by his least forgivable outburst, Shawmut ...”

“... was the rustle of the Holy Ghost, hers an oracular hooga-booga. The objections that Howe, Rahv, John Simon, the art critic Hilton Kramer and other keepers of the scrolls lodged against her were as much about the 1960s as they were about her, for no one in the Family (as Norman Podhoretz, a former Partisan Review-er, dubbed them) personified the 1960s more ...”

“... another group crossed a police cordon. Ten people were arrested; a few were elderly, including John Lynes, a legendary arrestable in his nineties. Behind the police cordon, where most demonstrators remained, four or five people in flowing red shifts appeared, walking at a painfully slow pace along the tarmac, gesturing mysteriously ahead of them, stopping ...”