The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

extreme, exclusive, almost a one-man genre.

Apart from quick marriages, quick food, pornography, prostitutes and pawnshops, the sand-locked town has nothing to offer but hazardry. There are no clocks, no windows; there is no outer reality.

‘Drop that pistol,’ he tells Humbert: ‘Soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting.’

in drunken scorn or cynical despair.

A sense of humour is a serious business; and it isn’t funny, not having one. Watch the humourless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humourless can programme themselves t

the steady smile of envious admiration;

from the sequestered innocence of 1962,

There is something whorish about looking for laughs, or laughs only, and there is certainly a good deal of excruciation in following such a quest.

Readers of the London Review of Books who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it.