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“... On 10 May 1933 an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, wrote in her diary a description of the clothes she was wearing on that sultry summer’s day. The description includes the phrase blue celanese trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles ...”

“... Writings, Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. Next year’s list will have Good as Gold by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail-bird, Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, John ...”

“... servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking Ladino, the ‘largely medieval Spanish of the Sephardim’. Bulgarian was the language used by the family servants. However, while Canetti, his family and friends spoke ...”

“... he would always look like a killer. Or as he put it ‘I do not come to pitty-patty.’ Peter Heller’s biography of Tyson* is a blend of cool hyperbole and keen insight into the logic of the boxing business: matching your fighter with the right opponents, boosting his prestige by dosing his appearances, nudging up the value of the purses, sewing up ...”

“... On​ 14 November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure ...”

“... To understand quite how extensive, and how important, the comparison is, you need to read Louis Sass’s wholly fascinating Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought, and The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. Sass is a professor of clinical psychology and Madness and ...”

“... though he knew he was in the Resistance, but the truth was that Gallimard had hobnobbed with Lt Heller of the Nazi Propagandastaffel and put the notorious pro-Nazi Drieu La Rochelle onto the Gallimard editorial committee. In effect, Camus used his own Resistance career and literary fame to get Gallimard off. The final break with Sartre came with the ...”

“... following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his ...”

“... Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail to register the impact of his hold on ...”

“... massaging Roth’s neck and he grabbed her breast, not exactly the Lubitsch touch. Anticipating Louis C.K.’s solo act by a couple of decades, Roth would masturbate in front of Inga, sometimes presenting as a gift ‘a semen-encrusted napkin’. While living in captivity with Bloom in London (he loathed London), he would take me-breaks over the phone ...”