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“... of both of these books) by Vice-President Dan Quayle’s announced upset over an episode of Murphy Brown, a television programme in which a single woman in her thirties found herself pregnant, decided to have her baby – and did so. Searching for someone or something to blame for the current state of the United States (including the recent LA riots), the ...”

“... to the differences between melancholy, and sadness, and nostalgia, and to what Turgenev, and what Jane Austen, and what Hardy, could tell us about these things, and I, after a silence that I had kept for twenty minutes or so, plucked up my courage to bare my soul to the company around the table, and I said that I knew nothing more melancholy than sun after ...”

“... was for sale.In her urbanist manifesto The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs wrote about ‘eyes on the street’: about the way that pedestrian traffic, people moving around – or sitting around – in public, kept a place safe and more than safe: convivial, gregarious. I think of what has come to my city as ‘the great ...”

“... portrait of such informal ravishing loveliness one felt one’s own complex sort of gratitude. (Jane Freilicher’s gorgeous gouaches come to mind.) Beauty is Truth. But she seemed not to realise when she had produced a winner. Her pictures hang on the walls indiscriminately; the stunning ones mixed in with a lot of mermaids, dreamy girls in ...”

“... I knew only that I had to survive,’ Jane Lazarre writes about the process of giving birth.I pushed hard only because that was the only way to get the bastard out. And because pushing is not an urge; it is a demand backed up by all the violence your body, turned suddenly into an enemy, has at its command … pushing with all my might, I experienced for a moment what I would feel for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying ...”

“... stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result of some artfully displaced ‘affair’ but of the ...”

“... like many others, he was tempted to hide his ‘timid heart’ by ‘ruffling’ in a blue or brown shirt. Certainly, he espoused hatred at the very moment he was claiming to be protected from it by Fascism. ‘The Seven Sages’ (1931) gives voice to an imaginary group of old men who gripe about the world and imply the poet’s descent from ...”

“... Hutchins’s novel need be read solely as displaced autobiography. Like similar forays by Barnes, Jane Bowles or Carson McCullers, Victorine makes its claim on us precisely because it transcends whatever idiosyncratic psychic turmoil it may once have registered. No, Hutchins will never please readers who judge Flaubertian self-effacement essential to literary ...”

“... was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.Early in 1966, when I was 23 years old – married, with a baby, and a graduate student at Cambridge – my wife and I, tired of ...”

“... talking, honest politics’, the slogan goes). For the latter, the worry is not simply Corbyn’s brown jackets and red ties, but the instinctive feeling that he would look out of place outside Downing Street. (Anyone who rules instinct out as a force in politics is naive.) Corbynites would no doubt reply, with some justice, that we need to reconceptualise ...”

“... In jeans with rips at the knee, red and black running trainers and a caramel jumper, he has brown-grey swept-up hair and tanned skin with a few wrinkles. He takes me to a corner sitting room with a lit fire; a small clock on the mantelpiece, flanked by two candlesticks with pink candles, will chime the hours. Larta brings me a cup of tea in a mug ...”

“... Wearing. BBC singles and serials both separately developed adaptations of Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre. In fact, as producers ruefully admitted, the upsurge of dramatisations of 19th-century novels was itself a response to ITV’s massively expensive, all-film versions of 20th-century novels such as Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown in the ...”

“... in 1945). As Bridget and I unlatched the gate and went in, the sun came out – just like in a Jane Austen novel when the heroine is about to get proposed to. We walked around; we scrutinised the inscription on the Blomfield Cross of Sacrifice. We read the homely greeting-card messages in the memorial book. (‘Sleep well, lads!’ ‘We’ll never forget ...”

“... Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel. Isherwood, who was in the ...”

“... she had bought the occasional tray cloth or hank of Sylko but, on a much more regular basis, plain brown paper packets of what in those days were called ‘towels’. The closing-down of the shop in the late Sixties had left Mrs Ransome anxious and unprotected and it came as a genuine surprise on venturing into Timothy White’s to find that technology in this ...”