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“... publishing house were girls with names, double and triple barrelled: Heathcote-Amery, Bonham-Carter, Sackville-West, Vane-Tempest-Stewart. And mostly their forenames ended, as well-bred girls’ forenames must, in ‘a’: Nigella, Cosima, Candida, Sophia, Samantha, Sabrina, Lucinda. ‘Famous Englishmen write to me about their daughters,’ Attallah ...”

“... I wouldn’t get it, and he wouldn’t notice it.’ But Henny isn’t a housewife of the sort Anne Sexton imagines in her poem ‘Housewife’: ‘See how she sits on her knees all day/faithfully washing herself down.’ She’s dark, angry, disgusting, unkempt. When Louisa’s teacher comes to dinner, she ‘was so startled that she hesitated for a ...”

“... produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott Carter – but one can’t help thinking he’d love to have the chance. Samuel Beckett rather lightly undertook the penning of a libretto for pre-minimalist American composer Morton Feldman. It has been averred (by Michael Tippett, who always acts as his own ...”

“... is about the same age as Lucy Honeychurch and she even has the same duvet cover as Helena Bonham-Carter, who plays Lucy in the film – greater identifications have been built on less. At any rate she feels just as trapped, or rather more trapped, because (unlike Lucy) she is all too aware of what’s at stake. She has Lucy to help her know. ‘Lucy ...”

“... in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or drifting, sometimes on fire, through the fables of Angela Carter. Meanwhile, back in the 1920s on the morning of her party, Clarissa Dalloway is mending a tear in her green dress. It is a favourite dress. It would be anyone’s favourite dress because it is both distinctive and yet suitable: it is one of the ‘little ...”

“... II, on whose death in 1488 the duchy was absorbed into France with the marriage of his daughter Anne to two successive Valois kings. It was there, in rather obscure circumstances, that Henri IV issued the famous edict which brought the Wars of Religion to a close. There, too, the young Louis XIV staged the arrest of Fouquet, the overmighty minister he ...”

“... States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is ...”

“... Chicago love affair to the political tribulations of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for ...”

“... would be wielded in giving a description and character summary. For example, the first time Anne Hollander was mentioned, I asked who she was. Karl didn’t say: ‘She’s a distinguished historian of fashion.’ He said: ‘She’s a tremendous pedant and aesthete of the knicker.’ This was delivered as: ‘She’s a [level-one italics] tremendous ...”

“... what is? Generations of feminists have asked the question never expressed better than by Angela Carter in the LRB in 1980: ‘Why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J-P?’At the end of the first year of the Sartre-Beauvoir pact – marked by that first experience of jealousy, which she dispelled by walking up ...”

“... give great soundbites when it’s about sex,’ she apologises to a furious Riki Anne Wilchins who had invited her to speak, ‘but I always fuck up politics.’ In a wondrous twist, Paris Lees credits Germaine Greer with guiding her to insight on this matter: Greer caused me to question my identity, and form a more complex one. She was ...”