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“... were five quarrels, I think.’ This is not survivor’s humour – in the line of resistance from Dorothy Parker to Lorrie Moore – which seeks finally to claim health and deny pain. Davis’s fussy drone is never funny like that, but she never stops being funny either. When the young man tears through the great books only to become ‘indignant’ at ...”

“... of urban alienation – and simultaneously reaches back to incorporate the styles and modes of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Perelman and Groucho Marx.For my young self, the crucial juncture occurred when, thanks to Annie Hall, Allen became famous in England. Up until 1976 he was an oddity, a little-known Jewish funny man, a minority-interest ...”

“... the writers have been brought together ‘over what, in some cases, would be their dead bodies’. Dorothy Parker, for instance, says she is ‘a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex ... But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lamp-posts to try to get our equality – dear child, we didn’t foresee those ...”

“... that a cartoonist from Spokane who didn’t finish high school has actually read Joyce, Kipling, Dorothy Parker and the New Yorker. In one place, at least, Kenner’s prose cartooning seems particularly unfortunate. My first afternoon with Chuck Jones was punctuated by a woman with a Social Conscience who charged him with promulgating violence, vide ...”

“... dreamers of dreams are the movers and shakers of the world for ever. Perhaps they are; and perhaps Dorothy Parker was also right, who sang that authors and actors and artists and such never know nothing and never know much, and who concluded: People Who Do Things exceed my endurance; God, for a man who solicits insurance! Either view could be supported ...”

“... hankering to play Nora in The Doll’s House would never be fulfilled without recourse to surgery. Dorothy Parker sniffed that she had cut off her nose to spite her race, but Brice was just trying to enlarge her repertoire. Things may be thought different now: Barbra Streisand has climbed the heights of Hollywood stardom without a nose job. Her big movie ...”

“... thousand members – including such celebrities as Eddie Cantor, Ernst Lubitsch, Boris Karloff and Dorothy Parker. In newsletters and radio broadcasts, at meetings, demonstrations and banquets, it called for a boycott of German products and vociferously supported the Spanish Republic and thus, for Breen, who sympathised with the Falangist rebellion, was a ...”

“... flanks. The 1938 House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into Hollywood inspired Dorothy Parker to remark that ‘the only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.’ To which we might add that, then as now, the only line the movie studios ever drew was the bottom ...”

“... with the then-embryo Algonquin network. In 1919, George Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the others were in their twenties and unknown. But they were wits, albeit at each other’s expense much of the time, and Ross watched with interest from the sidelines, every so often giving out ‘teamsterlike snorts’ of appreciation or ...”

“... Even with cuts, the book made a huge impression. Reviewing My Life in 1928 for the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker called Duncan a ‘generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman’: an instance of the pot calling the kettle fabulous. She thought the memoir was a ‘mess of prose’, but it didn’t matter because it was ‘profoundly moving’. The ...”

“... by as asps. All suicide, we are to believe, is painful, messy, undignified and inconvenient. Or as Dorothy Parker (an inveterate botcher of suicide) put it: Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. Britain’s policy of benign censorship keeps ...”

“... records itself. There are of course other writers of his period who were influenced by the cinema (Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, Scott Fitzgerald) but none of them quite allows the camera to examine its own processes, owning its own artifice. The famous passage comes in ‘A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930’, a section of Goodbye to Berlin: ‘I am a camera ...”

“... Zuckerman a decade earlier. In New York, Peyton writes, he fell in with the Gershwins. He met Dorothy Parker and got to know Tallulah Bankhead well enough to pick up the friendship again in London. During the Blitz, in between mapping the impact of bombs, he dined at the Savoy with Alfred Hitchcock. That friendship, too, continued for a lifetime. As ...”

“... only in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. As that firecracker of a wisecracker Dorothy Parker (49 quotations in the Yale v. a mingy 16 in the 2014 Oxford) said, ‘There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.’The convergence of philosophy with the ...”

“... on the battlefield, the other in a madhouse.E.M. Forster nervously pronounced it ‘unusual’. Dorothy Parker told everyone to read it at once. It was a great succès d’estime, if not a bestseller. What it cost Ede in the reawakening of his own experience of the war can only be imagined.It​ is at this point, halfway through the book, that Freeman ...”