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“... go. Writers under discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles ...”

“... of what appears to have been a long Platonic affair with a married court lady, Frau von Stein. He longs to travel in Italy, a journey he has often imagined, and which he postponed when he came to Weimar. Finally, in 1786, he asks for and is given a leave of absence and takes off for the better part of two years, visiting Verona, Padua, Venice and ...”

“... met Juliano in New York was beguiled: Danny Glover, Tony Kushner, the philanthropist and writer Jean Stein. Julian Schnabel cast him as a sheikh in Miral, Juliano’s last performance on film. Eve Ensler invited him to stage The Vagina Monologues in Jenin. In a city of hyphenated identities his mixed identity made him all the more attractive, and more ...”

“... it was in 1963 that the first of the great exclusions took place, Sollers’s rival at this point, Jean-Edern Hallier, retrospectively observing that there was not enough room for two male hippopotami in that particular water-hole. The reorganisation of the journal was entrusted to Marcellin Pleynet (one of the merits of Forest’s history is that he gives ...”

“... I well remember at the beginning of the war,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, ‘being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism ...”

“... lacked the resources to just get on a plane and leave.   So why hadn’t she. Like Gertrude Stein, her fellow Californian, Didion puts a period where a question mark belongs, and thus turns ordinary speech into dour, frightening pronouncement, heavy with portent. What is a hotel? An ignored symbol. As Didion writes in The White Album, ‘the Royal ...”

“... a similar defence of William in his relations with Alice. Many of her troubles, according to Jean Strouse, her biographer, were William’s fault. He is supposed to have dominated her, to have flirted with her, and to have contributed by his engagement and marriage to her mental breakdown. There is no doubt about his affection for her, and no doubt that ...”

“... of honest citizens living on either side of the Puget Sound urban corridor. Poujade – and Jean-Marie Le Pen – would have had a field day here; as, I’m afraid, will the McCain-Palin ticket in November. Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders. Reagan the Hollywood ...”

“... 1925, was considerably less daring: the fiction editor, Katharine White, rejected work by Gertrude Stein because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t understand.’) H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan subsidised their succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy ...”

“... and women. He became, over the years, a living rebuke to vanity, pomposity, charlatanry. Gertrude Stein, who thought only Spaniards could be Cubists (and who later offered to translate Pétain’s speeches), wrote a ‘word-portrait’ of Braque in her finest mode of clotted twaddle. (Perhaps it was meant to be Cubist prose. If so, a bad idea – brushstrokes ...”

“... for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates. While Dubuffet’s term is quite specific, the English term ‘outsider art’ is often applied more broadly, to ...”

“... person she encountered. Sexual partners included most of her leading men, notably sexy beast Jean Mounet-Sully, her beefcake colleague at the Comédie-Française in the 1870s (later known for his priceless mot, ‘until I was 60 I thought it was a bone’); the geriatric but still game Victor Hugo (he had directed her in her first Ruy Blas); Hugo’s ...”

“... interested in the science, the narratology, than in the story. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a short novel nearly everybody knows. Asked to tell its story you would have to give up any idea of following the order of events presented by the text. The play and the film give one an idea of the flattening out required to achieve the ...”