It used to be unthinkable that a decent literary agent would work anywhere but Manhattan.
To the modern mind, of course, this is wholly unacceptable, and any decent literary agent would have counselled Miss Austen to devise at least a modicum of private scandal if she wanted to sell any books.
In her recent book, Talking About Detective Fiction, PD James quotes Robert Graves's judgement: "Agatha's best work is, like PG Wodehouse and Noël Coward's best work, the most characteristic pleasure writing of this epoch and will appear one day in all decent literary histories.
When she imagined Obama in the White House, she envisioned a "cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent West Wing sort of president".
That nothing is what it seems is standard-issue Auster metaphysics, and the narrator here seems familiar, too — literary, Brooklyn-based, decent, if a trifle self-serious.
It runs a fine quadrennial games, a respected annual literary prize and a decent scholarship programme.
The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.
(Someday someone will compose a Ph.D. thesis, or at least a decent blog post, about the sons of literary men who have written ardently about pumping iron. These include Paul Fussell's son, and Ted Solotaroff's).
Add to those literary skills, wide reading, a decent humanity, humor, a Global Positioning Satellite receiver, a Force 9 gale and you have "The Water In Between," a delightful, finely written and, in the end, wise book.
Answering the door with telephone in hand, he gives the friendly impression that if he were not at the centre of a one-man literary industry, he might make a decent job of running the bank.
He helped start a tiny literary magazine; he had poems published in decent places.
