I doubt if there is a reader anywhere prepared to read 650 consecutive pages of Perelman at a sitting [as found in The Most of S. J. Perelman and Eastward Ha!]; Perelman's brew is far too heavily seasoned to swallow at a single meal, but an essay a night for three months and the trick is done.

There is a sense in which he is the most negative writer of his era. When I first read A Farewell to Omsk, nearly thirty years ago, and laughed over the passage describing a Russian who 'dislodged a piece of horseradish from his tie and shied it at a passing Nihilist', it escaped me at the time that the Nihilist was Perelman himself, a lampoonist who all his life has clutched gratefully at any wisps of literary horseradish that might come his way, with a view to analysing it in the minutest...