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“... In America, William Maxwell is something of a Grand Old Man. He has been president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has won the American Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. For forty years, as a fiction editor on the New Yorker, he advised and goaded Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and John Updike ...”

“... be published, indeed she sensibly provided for it. ‘I love reading Letters myself,’ she told William Maxwell, her literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to ...”

“... never do,’ which Neve said was as Wildean as it gets.It was J.D. Salinger, writing about William Shawn, who spoke of that rare thing, ‘born great artist-editors’, lovers of ‘the long shot’. I’ve admired a few editors, become their friends, holidayed with them and edited them back, fought for them, and put up with their grievances, as ...”

“... who’d studied Henry James with Tony Tanner. She sent me some promising recommendations – William Maxwell, Rohinton Mistry – but I wondered if nearly £2 a minute wasn’t pushing it. (Phone consultations, at £40, are cheaper.) I asked a friend who’d taught a class there about the School of Life. My friend said that it was like watching ...”

“... describes Fitzgerald’s devotion to the Princeton honour code (expressed in a letter to Maxwell Perkins) as ‘idealistic’, Mellow juxtaposes Fitzgerald’s letter with some pretty impressive bits of evidence that, honour code or no, would appear to suggest that Fitzgerald cheated on tests while at college. Time and again, then, Mellow provides a ...”

“... became engaged to the playwright and theatre critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ‘because of Maeve’.) In 1941, Brennan moved to Manhattan and soon found work at Harper’s Bazaar, where she stayed for seven years, rising through the ranks from a copywriter to an ...”

“... but of tongue-lessness. If deprivation is the sine qua non of a writer, as the great editor William Maxwell recently said, then the mother’s physical deficit was an ample lack for the son. In describing his situation he is unsparing of everyone’s sensibilities, including those of the reader: ‘the sound of her shriek would not go away ... it ...”

“... relations to her friendship with Graham Greene and her love affair with Naples. In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked ...”

“... in the New Yorker, where Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about ...”

“... years, the New Yorker published nearly every story she finished, 35 of them between 1948 and 1969. William Maxwell claimed that job applicants were given her stories to edit as a test, ‘and if they touched a hair of its head, by God, they were no editors’. There wasn’t much to tinker with: her style was spare, usually shorn of adverbs and ...”

“... This is the process, named after a legal battle involving the disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell, whereby those criticised in the first draft of a report are given an opportunity to respond. Chilcot hoped to begin this process in 2013, but negotiations over the publication of minutes of cabinet meetings and the correspondence between Tony Blair and ...”

“... feminism has proved of interest to the second wave, and much of her work has been republished. William Maxwell, a friend and correspondent who was for years her editor at the New Yorker, published a selection of her letters in 1982, and Claire Harman, having edited the Collected Poems in 1983, published a good biography in 1989. Wendy Mulford’s ...”

“... on 42nd Street, then one as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. A couple of years later, William Shawn hired her to write the ‘briefly noted’ reviews of historical novels and murder mysteries for the New Yorker. I asked people at the office who had known Maeve what she looked like when she arrived (strangely, I hadn’t been able to find any ...”

“... But about his relationship to the New Yorker, where he worked very closely with the editor, William Shawn, he cared a great deal. Shawn was the man who allowed the impossible to happen – like giving over the bulk of an entire issue of the magazine to ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’. On last-minute, minor matters Shawn was assisted by the fiction editor, ...”

“... except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’. A ...”