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“... Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them ‘shouldering their way through the long un-mown grass’. A bee must never be allowed to ‘shoulder’. Later that afternoon, Dorian Gray, alarmed by Lord Henry Wotton’s graphic talk of youth’s inevitable degeneration, drops a lilac blossom that he has been ‘feverishly’ sniffing ...”

“... gift for stopping time, which he exploits entirely for purposes of sexual satisfaction, but Nicholson Baker’s trademark as a novelist has always been a fetishising descriptiveness that retards the speed of events almost to the point of non-existence and has in the past generated much literary joy. The ‘action’ of his first novel, The ...”

“... Howie, the protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), asks whether our ‘disorganised do-it-yourself evening life’ can ‘really be the same as the clean, noble, Pendaflex life we lead in office buildings’. After all the ‘wealth and pomp’ of the office, ‘we return home every evening and stand sweating in front of a chest of drawers,’ pull out the loose coinage accumulated over the day, remove the ‘sticky lump’ of a wallet, store our pants away, and ‘walk about in our underpants and T-shirt waiting for the Ronzoni shells to boil ...”

“... Sometimes,’ a woman says during phone sex in Vox, Nicholson Baker’s first foray into smut, ‘I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialise in the room of the person I’m talking to.’ That’s more or less how people get to the House of Holes – a sexual spa resort, offering expensive bespoke treatments, located in a parallel dimension ...”

“... on ‘Sex and Death among the Disembodied’. And as the gold-embossed cover helpfully explains, Nicholson Baker’s new novel Vox is also ‘about Telephone Sex’, about getting turned on by tuning in. Jim and Abby meet on the phone-sex party line ‘2VOX’. By the time the book starts, they have punched in their private code numbers and transferred ...”

“... rear cinches, as is true of Texas, Montana and Wyoming rigs.’ Clearly this prairie precursor of Nicholson Baker had stumbled onto something here: the hidden agenda, evolution and variation in Western Stock Saddles. Following a brief survey of cantles and wedge-shape prolongations, the author eventually comes to grips with a subject that has serious ...”

“... Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine is a book about the mind electrically at odds with vacancy and repose; about the astonishing turbulence in the little grey cells of little grey people like you, and me, and Howie, who at lunchtime quits his office on the mezzanine floor and goes down the escalator to the street, to buy milk and cookies and a new pair of shoelaces ...”

“... In​ U&I (1991), his book about John Updike, Nicholson Baker imagines explaining the appeal of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to his literary hero. ‘You know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realise that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!’ But Updike couldn’t get used to the sex ...”

“... Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act (Penguin, $30), Nicholson Baker charts ‘the pathology of government secrecy’ through myriad frustrated FOIA requests about the US government’s biological weapons programme in the 1950s.In many countries, FOI is accused of reducing transparency by encouraging a ...”

“... to have tapped the potential of this relatively recent technological innovation; I’m surprised Nicholson Baker hasn’t made a whole book out of it.) I mention these messages because of the way they reveal Ford’s skill at conveying entire lives in very few words. (Nothing in The Sportswriter is more suggestive of the gulf/bond between Frank and the ...”

“... it’s like to be, well, past it. There is perhaps a surfeit of that Updikean fine writing which Nicholson Baker parodied so well – ‘the blank seemed, in its blankety blankness, and blanketed blinkness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk’ – or, to put it in Updike’s own words, too much verbaceous dwelling on ‘her green sheath, with ...”

“... is a study of envy and egomania that happens to play itself out in the world of publishing. Nicholson Baker in U and I probed the devastating realisation that Updike ‘writes better than I do and is smarter than I am’. Here, though, there is no sense of one writer warding off another’s potentially crushing influence, or of the fragile ...”

“... five hundred pages on a man getting himself a coffee from a vending machine (thereby outdoing Nicholson Baker in The Mezzanine, whose protagonist’s obsessive attention to gadgets and appliances is not unlike Marguerite’s). But After Absalon is clearly the culmination of the project: enough is enough, the last pages suggest, ‘the convoluted ...”

“... between the filmed and the written. In literature there is no clock time, no ‘real time’. When Nicholson Baker decides to set a whole novel in a lunch break (The Mezzanine) or Olaf Stapledon chooses a timescale of two billion years for Last and First Men, no technical innovation is necessary. They aren’t inventing a freedom but exercising one ...”

“... In September​ 1931, Barbara Hepworth invited Ben Nicholson to Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast. Both artists were married: Hepworth to the sculptor Jack Skeaping, whom she had met while on a scholarship in Rome, and Nicholson to the painter Winifred, who stayed behind at their farmhouse in Cumbria to look after their two small children and new baby ...”