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“... the news of death into the narrative. Sometimes this is literally done, as when the butler in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, with his face ‘blanched to a dead whiteness’, brings the news of Harry Carson’s murder to his family. More often, the implication of mortality is carried in the mute presence of their inexorable work, as it is in the ...”

“... stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly ...”

“... when you are in a different literary mood). Maureen Duffy traced Aphra-Eaffry Johnson’s parents, Elizabeth and Bartholomew (as the register spells him) Johnson, and much of their ancestry, and set out all the information, with proper scholarly caution and modesty as well as detail, in her Aphra Behn biography, The Passionate Shepherdess, which was published ...”

“... and notes, of very different dates, which Nietzsche’s dreadful sister, the energetic anti-semite Elizabeth, put together from his Nachlass according to an outline – only one of many different such plans – which Nietzsche had written on one sheet of paper for a book of that title. The Will to Power is a deeply interesting and powerful collection of ...”

“... its beginning from the female sex’. We must hope that the likes of Baroness Thatcher, Elizabeth Windsor, the Emperor Akihito and James Callaghan were informed of this when they were inducted into the order. Unfortunately for those of you keen to check the reference, the book has no notes, only a further reading list which has no mention of Signore ...”

“... that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings Mrs Bush initiated at the White House. Sittenfeld identified strongly with the portrayal of Laura Bush as a ‘voracious reader of fiction’, whose favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov. And ...”

“... In 1852, Elizabeth Barrett Browning met the expatriate American actress Charlotte Cushman (famous for her trouser roles) and her companion Matilda Hays, a writer and feminist. They had ‘made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other – they live together, dress alike,’ Barrett Browning wrote to her sister ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... is an establishment Democratic centrist who has never been an icon of the progressive left like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor ...”

“... followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s ...”

“... voice rang out: ‘You finally did it. Good on you, you old poof!’)At his subsequent wedding to David Furnish, Elton wasas happy as I could ever remember being. And that was when my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath … As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy ...”

“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... told Osbert that he had made ‘a great hit’ with her. Next day Osbert dictated a letter to David Horner reporting this event. His secretary omitted the word ‘great’; Osbert proudly wrote it in. It may be thought that there should have been something of a clash between Osbert’s social snobbery and his attachment to the avant-garde, his weakness ...”

“... of a historical phenomenon. The occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York ...”