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“... missing hands and feet, throats that can be seen through the space where the nose ought to be. Denis Johnson is another American writer who has attempted a large theme in a novel not-for-the-squeamish. Fiskadoro is about desolate survivors in Florida after a nuclear war. It is rather like a teenager’s ‘fantasy-book’, except that the prose is ...”

“... might call it, using one virus to eliminate another more virulent.) Nazi genocide is evoked by the Johnson’s SS (‘Shit Slaughter’) commandoes formed to undertake a hygienic final solution and rid the universe of Christian, temperate heterosexuals. In their active character, the Johnsons are vigilantes; less furiously, they are refugees, a utopian ...”

“... Americans in Vietnam who made napalm famous. Napalm is one of the first things that the title of Denis Johnson’s new novel brings to mind. Think of the opening of Apocalypse Now, the paradisal grove of palm trees against a clear sky, gradually obscured by clouds of dust whipped up by helicopter rotor blades, then suddenly obliterated by a salvo of ...”

“... Death​ was Denis Johnson’s subject: the already dead, the dying but not yet dead and the rush of life in its last seconds. In Angels (1983), his first novel, Johnson describes his protagonist’s final moments. Bill Houston, a petty criminal and heavy drinker, is facing the death penalty after killing a security guard:He felt he could hold his breath for ever – no problem ...”

“... that life lived in certain conditions is equivalent to a kind of death: this is at the centre of Denis Johnson’s novel too. Here, the blighted land is Nicaragua, which is hot enough for Hell. The air is a compound of diesel oil and greasy dirt. Johnson’s narrator, another unnamed woman, has come to Central America ...”

“... He fulfils their meagre requests for yarn or packets of seeds. He buys Romy books by Bukowski and Denis Johnson. He Googles the inmates to consider their crimes and Kushner channels some philosophising through his character: The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple ...”

“... Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust.’ Sixty years after ...”

“... themselves established. Rawson’s writers in this collection of his essays include Swift, Pope, Johnson, Fielding, Boswell, Cowper and Christopher Smart. There are major essays on the character of Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s Travels, ‘A Modest Proposal’, the poems, Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’, the Dunciad, Fielding’s Journey from This World to the ...”

“... briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis Healey. One is tempted to say that even in the MI5 officers’ mess, the idea of Denis Healey collaborating with Messrs Benn and Orme on anything at all must surely have required the assistance of a few double ...”

“... 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 selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of its reality. This is not to say that the stories Wolff selected were not interesting stories. Rather, it became abundantly clear ...”

“... altar boy. Jacques, a tall, painfully thin boy, left school early to become a factory worker in St Denis, the most proletarian suburb of Paris. This perfectly ordinary career was changed for ever by his call-up in 1917. He fought heroically at the front – an experience which scarred his life – and was then retained in the Army after the war, to be sent ...”

“... on her name and had better access to her than anyone except – maybe not even except – Denis; and that he was happy to get involved with all sorts of shysters and downright crooks in order to become rich. Being rich seems to have been something Mark thought he was born to, that he had a right to, and he was in a great hurry to get to it. He got ...”

“... in their lives because of it.’ Yeats had in mind his friends of the Nineties, especially Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons, poets who had awakened from the vulgarity of ‘the common dream’ – as Yeats calls it in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ – at the cost of falling into ‘dissipation and despair’. As a reader of Yeats, I felt obliged to ...”

“... Simpson’s housewarming party in 1888, again at Leopardstown Races, and who, now married to Denis Breen, he meets on the morning of the novel and in guilty hallucination in “Circe” ’. If flirtation and hallucination put us on the verge of adultery, we’re in trouble. There is also a very odd passage about masturbation. Brown rebukes Fritz Senn ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century ...”