In his own country, Perelman was latterly in danger of being cast as little more than a talented eye-witness, wittily recalling the supposed greats of Broadway, Hollywood and the New Yorker. And this was no doubt one of the reasons why we in Britain saw so much of him during the Seventies….

The very violence with which Perelman's prose lurches from the Bowery into the Rare Books Room of the British Museum and back again implies in itself that there is a conscious and moderate way to treat language, and a correspondingly civilised way to treat those who use it. Any humorist who loses this kind of moral equilibrium may be briefly zany, but thereafter he'll be unreadable.

Perelman was never that, but he remains too wordy for some tastes. The New Yorker has never been too hard on garrulity, and plenty of its writers have run stringily...