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“... may actually be a car salesman who was once a ventriloquist. His dummy may really be called Joe McCarthy, and he may really be planning a comeback as a hip-hop act. His name may have been omitted from my cuttings. I can’t rule it out. I know that Indiana has bumped off at least one still-living character, and I am almost sure that Irene Silverman, the ...”

“... she was appalled at his appearance, as we learn from the editor’s coda to the diary: ‘Joseph, Mary and Jesus,’ she says she said, ‘what have they done to you?’ The Arthur who loathed perfume and powder and who more than once had ordered his girls to scrub the paint off their faces was gussied up with cosmetics, It made her laugh and cry. She told ...”

“... she is one, an avenging angel.’ Rita Hayworth, Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one ...”

“... flicker by like riffled pages. World War Two; the lure of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I ...”

“... of their fallen leader, facing each other over the political barricades in 1968 while Eugene McCarthy mocked Bobby to his face, shouting, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy!’ and getting all the Kennedy generation kids to believe him; Ted Kennedy fleeing in panic from Chappaquiddick, where his Presidential hopes lay expiring next to ...”

“... in charge.It’s difficult to imagine a world in which no other people exist. Writers try. Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, where father and son, post-apocalypse, are attempting to survive by making their way south out of the cold. How are you going to fill a book with just man talking to boy? Fifty pages through the novel they finally see someone else on the ...”

“... Joseph Patrick Kennedy was born in the Irish enclave of East Boston in 1888, the first child of Mary Augusta Hickey, the daughter of a successful builder, and Patrick Joseph Kennedy, a Democratic party official with a series of no-show government jobs and a variety of local business interests ranging from liquor and banking to real estate. By the time Joe ...”

“... fiction, to the detriment of Jules Verne or that other increasingly popular recent candidate, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). But where did the genre come from? My own hypothesis is a very general one: namely, that the late 19th-century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott’s invention of the modern historical novel in Waverley ...”

“... her costume like a plump English rose trying to play the innkeeper’s wife who turns Joseph and Mary away in a school nativity play. Her role as a dream creature indifferent to the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike demureness, even ...”

“... He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The ...”

“... say, in a moment of leisure from aping the worst excesses of the chauvinistic sexist male: Please, Mary. Homophobia is resilient as a system because of a quirk of its chronology: even those individuals who will suffer in time profit from it before it works against them. Any child, any male child at least, has disparaged gay people, or at least been a party to ...”

“... into the 1950s. It’s a bit of a girl thing: Steffens is also Norine’s favourite writer in Mary McCarthy’s The Group. With this crucial difference: Monroe was not a Vassar girl. Unlike Norine, she had no education. She educated – she never stopped educating – herself. ‘Of the cruelties directed at this young woman,’ Diana Trilling wrote ...”

“... elation created by the new generation in Dublin which Roy Foster describes in Vivid Faces (2015). Mary Colum, for example, later wrote about her time teaching at Pearse’s school:The teaching staff was young, and we seemed, all of us, to be travelling on the same road … Looking back, it seems incredible that so many young people were eager to devote their ...”