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“... working for Tina Brown’s Talk. She has ‘great media contacts’: her mother is the novelist Sally Emerson; her father is Sir Peter Stothard, the freshly knighted editor of the TLS and former editor of the Times. So who cares about the text? The whole circus could be seen as a pale attempt to follow the transatlantic precedent set by Nick ...”

“... for instance, that worked Evelyn Waugh up to his refugee-in-America satire, The Loved One. Sally Emerson’s The Listeners shapes up as if it is going to be a rather conventional and thoroughly English novel of the kind Malcolm Bradbury describes as chronicling the female orgasm in Hampstead for female readers in Hampstead. The heroine, Jennifer ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental. Jim was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois; Sally taught English at a community college, and at home with her children was what her son in his fiction would term a ‘militant grammarian’, constantly monitoring their usage and syntax, turning it into a game ...”

“... in Connecticut and taking him back to Haddam for a year or two. To this end, he packs a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and tries to work up seasonal pep talks ‘under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence”’. Frank also has a rubric for this stage of his life, ‘a time I think of as the ...”

“... instead, or take up a hobby, something self-improving – how about reading? You might start with Emerson: Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he ...”