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“... Joyce Johnson was Jack Kerouac’s lover during a brief but crucial period in his career. She met him on a blind date fixed up by Allen Ginsberg in January 1957, nine months before the publication of his second novel. Outside a small circle of avant-garde writers and artists and drinking buddies, Kerouac then had few admirers ...”

“... short life, big talent and last dollar were all just about exhausted when the young writer Joyce Glassman bought him a dinner of hot dogs and beans on a Saturday night in New York City in January 1957. Glassman understood he was broke, but the rest she learned only later. She thought Kerouac was beautiful, with his blue eyes and sunburned skin. He had ...”

“... apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic. Joyce relentlessly explicated it, and gave his fans the authorised version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be read. Nothing said about Ulysses seems to spoil it. But Finnegans Wake lacks this ...”

“... acquitted – Baraka helped persuade the grand jury by reading from the decision in the trial of Joyce’s Ulysses – and the magazine continued to come out, albeit with diminishing frequency, until 1969. William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Barbara Guest all appeared in its pages. Producing the Floating Bear was an ‘endless ...”

“... on a small cast-iron charcoal brazier in the corner. In Nigeria we had a cook and a houseboy, Johnson and Israel. Johnson was very old, his hair was greying, and he was very set in his ways. When I read Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson I always think of ...”

“... Until very recently I had never read any B.S. Johnson. I had a staticky reminiscence of what he might have been, which could be represented, using his own idiosyncratic conventions for marking the lapses that run through our consciousness of the world, as ‘experimental … . suicide … . wrists was it?’To clear the static first: these reprints are to celebrate what would have been the eightieth birthday of the novelist B ...”

“... the way he expressed them seemed like a return to the sinewy and colloquial manner of Dryden or Johnson, the no-nonsense prose that corresponded to the Metaphysicals’ directness and wit in verse. After flowery and carefully euphonious Edwardian fine writing, the paragraphs of a George Moore or of Chesterton himself with his well-turned ...”

“... problems of nationality are caused by people wandering about. For example, the trial of the other Joyce – William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw – demonstrated that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William ...”

“... defence from its British publisher, John Calder (who claimed to discern in Burroughs the James Joyce of our day), Naked Lunch went on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval and minority sales prospects. In a manner of ...”

“... In his notes he has invented a character called Steve Ketehell who I guess he thinks fought Jack Johnson, but we know that was Stanley Ketchell, if not Ketchel, don’t we Pos? The poor sap was knocked out by Johnson and murdered in 1910 before I had the chance to teach him to see it coming. We have some swell fights up ...”

“... Minister but not a major political party, a provincial town but not a capital city. A writer like Joyce can put together an immensely painstaking reconstruction of the past without linking it in any way to a historical narrative, while other novelists treat strictly contemporary events as history-in-the-making, much as journalists do. Rather like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before he took over the Dial, he wrote James Joyce a cheque for $700; it came to Joyce from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially ...”

“... they mirror. With dozens of books on subjects as various as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, geodesic domes and computer poetry to his credit, Hugh Kenner, one of the moving forces behind the California series, is the éminence grise of American Modernism. It is not hard to imagine why he likes cartoons in general and Chuck Jones in ...”

“... is even a case to be made for Giles Gordon being the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s ...”