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“... stockings and high heels touchingly comic. Pym valiantly kept up with new writers: Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs. A James Baldwin novel, she wrote to Larkin, quoting the publishers’ blurb, was indeed ‘powerful’. She thought it ‘a very well-written book, but so upsetting – one is really glad ...”

“... and the writers he respected or got on with were often women: Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Margaret Drabble, Alison Lurie. The letters from Farrell’s years of post-Booker fame are an education in the glamour of English literary celebrity. ‘I don’t want to be interfering about your azalea,’ he writes to ...”

“... Palais des Congrès. After your overcrafted paper sinks to cool applause you watch the back of Margaret Drabble’s head let loose hooves and Styx and stories of supper to lope the room. Applause is warm. Q&A is daft. A Washington journalist asks and answers everything. Outside in the hall you recognise Z still in mid-sentence since 1986, urging you ...”

“... collectively on our behalf, then I think it would have been better to let the Falklands go.’ Margaret Drabble angrily refuses the invitation to ‘congratulate ourselves on a principled stand that everyone knows we would not have dared to take on a more dangerous issue … we won, with more difficulty than we anticipated, a very small war that need ...”

“... too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (1960); Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965). That phrase, ‘bad taste’ (‘mauvais goût’), gives us a clue to what Ernaux has been reading. Pierre Bourdieu’s Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation ...”

“... understand or feel sympathy with a man. The honesty of that remark shows just how far, in the post-Drabble-Byatt novel, the process has gone. Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Taylor ignored, in their individual ways, all idea of being ‘women novelists’, as Anita Brookner does today. However ‘feminine’ their subject-matter, they don’t approach it ...”

“... in the script. The country rejects the worn-out panaceas of the Labour administration and elects Margaret Thatcher, and she, with what Cameron calls ‘huge courage and perseverance’, sets Britain on a dynamic new course towards its now tremulous destiny as financial capitalism’s leading counting house. Thatcher is the phoenix; the 1970s, the ...”

“... such an abrupt reduction in rank. Granted, there’s almost too much ring-around-the-rosey, Lady Margaret Cavendish-style fantasia here to take in in one go. The mind boggles. While no doubt a fair indicator of incipient maternal megalomania, ‘Reverend Countess’ – my mother’s (theologically confused) designation for herself – remains deeply ...”

“... and allegory; bossy authorial intrusion; shallow comic effects), instanced Golding, Carter, Spark, Drabble, Byatt, Murdoch, Wilson, the Amises. Powell? Unnameable: in a feat worthy of a latter-day Sainte-Beuve, beyond even deprecation. The left? One night at the turn of the 1970s, slumped in a dive on Margaret Street ...”