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“... conversation, from court gossip, reports of his hunting prowess and the tunes of seguidillas, to frank discussions of masturbation and some remarkable doodles, including a self-portrait of Goya smoking a cigarette. The two men exchanged drawings of their penises (‘Jesus! What a testimony!’ Goya marvelled on receiving Zapater’s letter). During an ...”

“... for Hades. The ambiguous title fits a novel remarkable for its complex geographical situation. Joseph O’Neill, with his mixed Irish and Turkish parentage, and a childhood spent partly in the Hague, now lives in New York City. Hans is more simply Dutch, born and raised. His wife, Rachel, is English, though she gives birth to their son in New York, where ...”

“... and instantly recognisable, figure of ‘Homer Simpsoane’, who (obviously having read Darley’s frank biography) has no trouble at all in identifying this obsessive and sadistic father as ‘the first Dysfunctionalist’. The 20th-century enthusiasm for Soane’s work might seem to be just another strand in the traditional tale of architectural revaluation ...”

“... overwhelming’. He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s interest in the young Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers, and in the novella Disorder and Early Sorrow, written when Elisabeth was seven, the relationship between the bookish father and his young daughter, clearly based on Mann’s relationship with ...”

“... to Wolfe. He, at least, knows what he’s on about. As the Eighties advance, he is more and more frank about his convictions. These are: that the United States was stabbed in the back over Vietnam (‘The Truest Sport’); that welfare deliberately encouraged ghetto insurrection (‘Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers’); that élitist designers are responsible ...”

“... It may be dance of poetry. It is certainly cinema. In 1955, be was similarly overpraising Joseph Mankiewicz; five years later, he was ‘both admiring and jealous’ of ... Samuel Fuller. Some of this excitement was due to the war time absence of American movies; afterwards, they burst on France as French, Italian and Swedish films burst on ...”

“... taken over a nearby house vacated by a family of settlers. They’re disturbed late at night by Joseph, a terrified Frenchman, returning to his relatives’ property to escape the wave of post-independence violence against the Europeans. Egged on by his crone of a mother, Haroun fires two rounds at Joseph and buries him ...”

“... it.Chanan is an intellectual, and his ruminations on the meaning of his story are always sensible. Joseph Lanza despises intellectuals and has no more interest in being sensible than he has a talent for it. Elevator Music, subtitled ‘A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong’, is a dotty book, a tireless and tiring panegyric to musical ...”

“... is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience familiar with the King James ...”

“... his son the poet for a bad notice (by John Davidson), the consolation is a true one (is not, in Frank Kermode’s great phrase, ‘too consolatory to console’) because it is so unexpected in the turn it takes: ‘I laughed very much and without any bitterness over the offending criticism and assuming Davidson to be the author liked him all the better. It ...”

“... Joseph Schumpeter had a refreshing sense of socialism. For him, it had almost no fixed sense at all. ‘A society may be fully and truly socialist and yet be led by an absolute ruler or be organised in the most democratic of all possible ways; it may be aristocratic or proletarian; it may be a theocracy and hierarchic or atheist and indifferent to religion; it may be much more strictly disciplined than men are in a modern army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite; it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; its forms of life individualistic or standardised ...”

“... on the sweetness of spring – and aims to steal and blasphemously deface the works he pilfers. Frank Kermode calls that seminal poem a work of ‘decreation’, and the figure that Eliot aspires to be is that of decreator. The poet is not now – is no more – godlike, but is instead a vandal, a criminal, an annihilator of all that’s made to a murderous ...”

“... daughter, heads off to ‘Fucktown’, USA – the Beverly Hills of porn – to confront Joseph A., who turns out to be a high-end porno producer and retired London villain. Clint Smoker is already in town, conducting admiring interviews with the likes of Dork Bogarde and Hick Johnsonson (and taking a furtive trip to the San Sebastiano Academy for ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell​ of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did ...”

“... première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of molesting and murdering a white female employee.) Atlanta was the headquarters of the powerful Twenties’ Klan, which augmented the negrophobia of ...”