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“... Theodore Swenson regrets his virtues. The protagonist of Francine Prose’s novel has been a popular creative writing professor for twenty years, but he has never – not once – slept with a student. Most of the time he attributes this to his love for his wife: ‘His marriage meant everything to him. That’s what he imagined telling admiring students if it ever came to that ...”

“... tenure difficulties has been explored with varying degrees of insight by writers as different as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, James Hynes and even Jonathan Franzen in the opening pages of The Corrections. The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is ...”

“... pretend very successfully to refuse this nature, and Allen is going out of his way to exploit it. Francine Prose thinks there is a deep misogyny in this film, and has written eloquently about it. She may be right, if misogyny is the name for what drives a movie that is interested only in its female characters – the sister too (wonderfully played by ...”

“... walked back to Les Bugues broken in two.’ Jérôme is the uncle of the narrator, Francine, nicknamed Françou. Her brother, Nicolas, has just beaten Jérôme to a pulp because Francine told him that Jérôme was sleeping with his wife, Clémence. Howling in pain, Jérôme drags himself back from the fields ...”

“... entirely wilful and implicit with the grandiosity of the child laying claim to his domain. Francine du Plessix Gray, in this wildly partisan and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Colet, whom she attempts to reinstate as a female icon and ‘yet another woman whose memory has been erased by the caprices of men’, makes many claims for her ...”

“... threat, and probably about much else, makes me more rather than less irritated by this kind of prose. If it’s a ‘quibble’ to dispute the quality of acting or photography, then it’s a quibble to argue over the merits of Cimino and da Palma, as Wood does for page upon page. The habit of underlining ordinary words as a means of imparting a false sense ...”

“... underwear, the trauma of his wedding night, his ‘adultery’ with the mauve satin bra of Mlle Francine, cashier at the Majestic Cinema, and the catastrophe of his life’s drama: his ‘rape’ of a black nylon suspender belt glimpsed fleetingly in the Paris Metro at the end of a Christmas shopping expedition squandered in the ecstatic purchase of ...”

“... the threat, perhaps even make it part of the glamour, part of the flourish. In his non-fictional prose Camus is the man who comes through, finds resources, defeats despair. He returns to Tipasa, in a famous essay bearing that title (‘Retour à Tipasa’, also in L’Eté), touches base with the Roman ruins and the sunlight and sea of his native ...”

“... career. In 1996, Philip Roth, the lean fireballer who had long been the Sandy Koufax of American prose, executed a strategic withdrawal from the world and took refuge in the hushed bosom of his 150-acre Connecticut estate. Previous withdrawals into the protective bubble of privacy and hard work had been tactical, provisional. But just because you have a ...”