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“... to those exposers of knavery, La Rochefoucauld and Stendhal, and those exposers of foolishness, Jane Austen and Montaigne; all have major speaking parts in Elster’s play. In fact, his usual audience of economists, political scientists and psychologists are liable to take exception to his overt pleas for belletrism. In disciplines that frown on any ...”

“... speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral ...”

“... has been part of the critical repertoire of other literary disciplines for several years: Nancy Miller’s Getting Personal (1991) is cited repeatedly throughout the book and there is plenty of new material of this kind in H. Aram Veeser’s collection, Confessions of the Critics (which also, broadmindedly, includes a spirited attack on this whole critical ...”

“... both the gaze and the true, secret self. When Pecola goes to the store in town to buy some Mary Jane candies, Mr Yacobowski, who is white, looks at her with reluctance. ‘Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate and hover … He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.’ This ‘vacuum ...”

“... In her unfinished novel Sanditon written in 1817, twenty years after the poet’s death, Jane Austen conveys such suspicions very sharply. Her heroine converses in Chapter Seven with Sir Edward, a foolish man of feeling for whom Burns was ‘propelled’, in art and life, by ‘the sovereign impulses of illimitable ardour’. Charlotte won’t have ...”

“... to separate and rank the different sorts of knowledge we’ve acquired, though Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2001) did as much as one might reasonably hope (or wish) to read. Last year was the first of the Brontë children’s bicentenaries: Charlotte was born in 1816, Patrick Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818 and Anne in 1820. The anniversary ...”

“... paid off handsomely, though Greene ended up with little profit when he was squeezed out by Arthur Miller. It was a time of crisis for Marilyn, when her marriage to Joe DiMaggio was breaking up and her affair with Miller beginning. In 1956 she converted to Judaism, married Miller, and went ...”

“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral sophistication ...”

“... in 1922, she was close to the Bloomsbury set, and an emblem of Sapphic modernity herself (with Jane Heap of the Little Review to Todd’s Madge Garland, her fashion editor at Vogue). Woolf called her Champco, and borrowed her clothes: ‘How odd, it comes into my mind, is Nessa & my jealousy of each other’s clothes! I feel her, when I put on my smart ...”

“... throwing him into a career as an all-round man-of-letters, which he pursued with gusto. Karl Miller, a frequent commissioner of his reviews for the Spectator and the New Statesman during the late 1950s and 1960s, recalled Amis’s impact in this role: ‘To the older literati he was his jokes and sneers and funny faces, a low and vulgar fellow – which ...”

“... of his early love poems; Fanny Falkner, who accepted a proposal of marriage but changed her mind; Jane Gryffydh, ‘the Caernarvonshire nymph’ of his first tour to Wales, and hot on her heels another unidentified ‘Caernarvonshire charmer’; the sisters Clarinda and Cecilia Knowles, who both received and rejected proposals in short order; an ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned ...”

“... his doddering years.‘Philip had searched diligently for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”

“... make him out to be empty: a poor heart does not so imbibe. Elsewhere, as both Louisa Stuart and Jane Austen cause us to be aware, playing amiable was an attribute of the tyrannical male. Here and there, the two texts coincide. The memoir says that a daughter of Townshend’s by Lady Dalkeith was seen to step ‘into a post-chaise with a gentleman, and came ...”

“... Leigh was published in 1857, reviewers pointed out a striking resemblance to much in the plot of Jane Eyre. Romney Leigh, her cousin, whom the half-English half-Italian Aurora eventually marries, is blinded in a fire like Mr Rochester. But instead of being a powerful Gothic figure, he is a copybook prig with socialist principles. Self-esteemers with a need ...”