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“... I was so angry​ ,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown up rich in Connecticut and New York, attended Yale, but found himself in ‘combat with the world’ for reasons he couldn’t understand; his early novels reflect this ...”

“... speaking his mind, getting it wrong sometimes, looking on the bright side, and staying involved. Peter Matthiessen, the accomplished author of numerous books of travel and of wry and terrible tales of violence on remote frontiers, perhaps also considers himself a friend of Africa. He loves to be there and incessantly returns: there are many things in ...”

“... only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as cover for some ...”

“... Travelling in the Andean highlands of Peru some thirty years ago, Peter Matthiessen observed a group of drunken Quechua Indians. ‘In this state the Quechua looks more slack-jawed and brutish than the most primitive man imaginable.’ The Indians were ‘rife with hatreds and resentments ... But they are so subdued by their own poverty, and by their failure to realise how very numerous they are, that a Quechua revolution, while one day inevitable, remains remote ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was ...”

“... journey through Tibet, for all its mountain fastness, to a descent into the underworld.’ Like Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard, Thubron turns out to have gone to the Himalayas to grieve. When his guide Iswor asks the inevitable question – ‘And you? Why are you doing this, travelling alone?’ – he responds with a joke but tells the reader ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... didn’t Forster publish Maurice in 1914, when he wrote it? Why didn’t the American critic F.O. Matthiessen write a history of gay American writing? How come Lionel Trilling didn’t realise that Forster was gay? And why are gay lives presented as tragic in so much writing? Why can’t gay writers give gay men happy endings, as Jane Austen gave ...”

“... stretched out naked on her bed upstairs during a bibulous evening with the Styrons, Nichols, Peter Matthiessen and the rest, Mahoney comments – with the bizarre know-nothingism of the amnesiac – that her ‘nipples were the size of Oreos’. This culminating image of the post-prandial, brown-nippled Hellman – comatose, alone, exposed and ...”

“... Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a grey ...”