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“... for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of fiction, only The Bear Boy ...”

“... he earned a living from the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue and shared an apartment with Philip Roth. In 1964 he designed the poster for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His pacifism and his posters against the war in Vietnam brought him to the attention of the FBI; he was blacklisted until 1993. He campaigned, too, on behalf of the civil rights ...”

“... a hard time beating Scotland 2-1 in 1998, Germany only squeaked 1-0 past Bolivia in 1994, Italy drew with Bulgaria in 1986 and Argentina (again) lost to Belgium in 1982. So that would have been a safe non-entrail-based prediction for today, that Brazil would have a hard time in the opening game. Except they aren’t playing in the opening game. Instead ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... to me here. The only other place I have seen the word ‘corpun’ in print is in the Letters of Philip Larkin. As a neologism, it is as ugly as any one could contrive, but as a salacious expression and – apparently – as a piece of authentic Englishry, it was very close to his core.)The key phrase in Captain Waterhouse’s distraught peroration above is ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... to join the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Eliot and Pound never happened. Tomlinson refuses to put the clock back to pretend that after Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens have written in ...”

“... School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at Lord’s.Like Station Island, though ...”

“... to self-help, therapy and the rhetoric that goes with them. David Foster Wallace, whose fiction drew on his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, was outed as a reader of self-help after his death. George Saunders has called fiction ‘a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth’. Both writers delivered college commencement addresses ...”

“... about his pursuit of a witch.Witekind’s account spread throughout Europe, reaching the reformer Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg, as well as his son-in-law, Caspar Peucer, who recorded the story in 1560. Peucer’s reference to werewolves as the enemies of witches then found its way into the work of the Italian bishop Simone Maioli, from where it was ...”

“... her. She asks him to leave. He stays: ‘Whatever … Be friends.’ He touches her arm. ‘She drew away and stood up and he was all around her then … He didn’t exert pressure or try to caress her breasts or hips but held her in a kind of loose containment.’ She retreats to the bathroom. He masturbates sitting on her bed, then begs ‘forgive ...”

“... His face lit up: I’m from Palestine, too, he said, from Jaffa. Ibrahim was studying with Philip Hitti, a Lebanese immigrant who had established a leading department of ‘Oriental Studies’ – meaning mainly Arab history and culture. He introduced me to the other Arab graduate students, and in no time at all I had a small group of older friends ...”

“... and other dramatists of the time. Then think of the medieval minstrels and ballad-singers, who drew great audiences in village or castle to hear them recite poems. Think of the peasants in Russia, in Ireland, in Spain, in many other countries, still making up their own poems. In his ‘Lecture on the Uses of Poetry’, William Cullen Bryant, the great ...”

“... house that specialised in oysters. He liked to collect the shells. I have one here as I write: he drew on them with a pen to reveal the faces of Greek gods in their crevices. Norman knew everybody in the place and he asked for a kind of vodka punch. He always drank horrible drinks: at one point, back at his house, he asked me to make him a rum and grapefruit ...”

“... history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class ...”