“... documented here, both in an introduction by John Weightman and in a postscript on the ‘Life and Death of Emile Ajar’ which Gary left behind at his death, by suicide, in 1980. Weightman dilates on the ‘cliquish’ nature of Parisian literary politics, and Gary himself confirms that it was the arbitrary and vindictive ...”

“... his seat, until, brought before the Ottoman authority and given the alternative of apostasy or death, he ‘took the turban’, became an official in the Turkish service, and ended his days not uncomfortably in an exile’s residence at Dulcigno (Ulcinj) on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. I find, however, that as soon as I attempt to write the story ...”

“... donkeys constantly. During this time she attempted several novels – ‘The Pink Sphinx’, ‘Death Comes for the Yaya’, ‘Women Travelling Alone’ – but they all ended up in the drawer.No Clouds of Glory, her first published novel, came out in Canada in 1968 and was reissued in the US six years later as ...”

“... health and fortune that haunts her fiction was the product of experience. Unexplained decline and death is a common plot device. It is easy to smile at the narrative convenience of these obscure illnesses, but Wood’s much-loved grandfather, the foundation of the family’s fortune, died just as many of her characters do – of an illness which ‘baffled ...”

“... alone echoes in the France of the Liberation with an emotional charge equal to that of Verdun.’ Sarah Farmer’s account of Oradour’s destruction is muted: Four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town of Oradour in the rolling farm country of the Limousin and rounded up its inhabitants. In the marketplace they divided the ...”

“... were both applauded and judged harshly when she was alive. Now, forty years after her death, they are the subject of increasing critical interest. In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ...”

“... But popular piety preserved the romantic lie about the wasting consumptive and her gentle death; the sordid realities of vomiting and bedsores were suppressed, and her convent’s policy of denying Thérèse pain relief was elevated into suffering gladly embraced. Kathryn Harrison’s short life of Thérèse complements Monica Furlong’s 1987 ...”

“... don’t like people asking me questions.’ He suspects that what’s troubling her is the recent death of her father, Serk, an academic on sabbatical in Japan. He drowned one evening after he and Louisa took a walk together by the sea. ‘You told people your father was kidnapped,’ Dr Brickner says. ‘I think you meant he’d been taken away from ...”

“... would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this book, James Whorton makes it clear that dealing death by poison was not, after all, exclusively suburban, although, apart from later industrial disasters, it does seem to have been almost entirely domesticated. The poison in Whorton’s book is specifically arsenic, and the deaths were only sometimes the ...”

“... on the general question of whether the work as a whole is well executed,’ Strabo writes (in Sarah Pothecary’s translation), ‘so one should exercise similar judgment in the case of this work. It, too, is a colossus [kolossourgia], dealing with mega-issues and general matters.’ He concludes by making an even grander claim for what his work will ...”

“... described the work in his memoir, A Forger’s Life (2009), written with his daughter Sarah: ‘I dreaded the technical error, the small mistake, the tiny detail that could have escaped me. The slightest second of inattention can prove fatal, and on each piece of paper depends the life or death of a human ...”

“... gruesomely named ‘Swann’s Songs’ is discovered years later by a young feminist scholar, Sarah Maloney, and Swann’s reputation begins to grow. Scheming academics, obsessive literary biographers, unreliable or downright devious relatives, neighbours and acquaintances of the dead woman, combine to clarify (or is it obscure?) the circumstances of her ...”

“... earlier part of the narrator’s life.It’s a daunting move, opening a collection with a pet’s death – ‘I’d always known I’d have to live without her someday; I just hadn’t known it would be tomorrow’ – but it only gets grimmer, in a euphoric way, from there. The narrator who presides over most of the book is rueful, plaintive, with a ...”

“... of the Avant-Garde , dealing with the history of the New York art world from 1940 to 1985, Sarah Crane reflects on the differences between success in the literary marketplace and success for the visual artist. Because novels sell at a much lower price than paintings or other artworks, the market for literature is much greater and commercial success ...”