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“... Still, a rare photograph of a bag on the go shows how completely it can focus a look. Jane Fonda, snapped while shooting La Curée in 1965, has the chain strap of a quilted Chanel bag looped over her arm. No downward dangle here: it swings at an angle, echoing the jaunty tilt of her on-the-knee coat and high heels. Everything light and ...”

“... doesn’t look criminal if you get a young, middle-class housewife to do it. I looked like Jane Birkin in Slogan, if Slogan had been set in a scout camp in Poland. I worked the way Patty Hearst would have robbed banks if she’d never met the SLA. The militant wing of Global Rivers Alliance radiated innocent industry.’ At the end of the book, Tiffany ...”

“... walls and some nice portraits. They are so easy to talk to, the time flew. We had lapsang tea, brown toast, redcurrant jelly and ginger cake. He told me he had been inspired to write after reading Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (just as I had been inspired by Crome Yellow). He said that Anthony Powell and I were the only novelists he would buy ...”

“... vision of connections between the new poets and ‘Orinda’ (Katherine Philips), Aphra Behn and Jane Barker, as well as their connections to the work of Rochester and Dryden. (Women wrote elegies for both of these earlier ‘Augustans’: in 1700 The Nine Muses, a collection of poems entirely by women, laments Dryden’s death.) Not only did women poets of ...”

“... circulated about her well-publicised weakness for male attendants like the Scottish gillie, John Brown, the Queen did not always adhere to this message. While Victoria may surely be forgiven for relaxing her grasp on the marble Albert, her refusal to moderate her attentions to Brown suggests that in this ...”

“... content and action. One question was: when did all this prudery begin? Thanks to the work of E.K. Brown, M. Jaeger and M.J. Quinlan, historians since the Forties have accepted that the austere ideology of ‘Victorianism’ was already in place among the middle classes, as well as the poor, by 1800. There is no way around the fact that the novels of ...”

“... a braided rug, a tear in the screen door, a bust of Brahms, the water oiling itself between brown riverbanks. Under the tutelage of Mary Tucker, perhaps the first woman she ever loved romantically, she practised the piano for hours a day, repeating the same tricky passages until she was a general menace to the neighbourhood. After a bout of rheumatic ...”

“... that ‘hearing a sentence he heard feet marching.’ In one instance he adds, ‘Syntax, N. O. Brown told me, is the arrangement of the army,’ above which, on the same page, we find: ‘The masterpieces of Western music exemplify monarchy and dictatorship.’ I do not really understand what Cage hears in Fidelio or Peter Grimes – or in any number of ...”

“... hushed interregnum when both Bingley and Darcy have disappeared and with them the prospects for Jane; and it is while travelling with her aunt and uncle that Elizabeth renews her relations with Darcy. It is through them that she discovers that Darcy has rescued her sister Lydia. In other words, they offer stillness, unforced opportunity, vital information ...”

“... The house metaphor was used in her later novels, but never so successfully after the Terror. Jane Austen read Smith’s novels as they appeared through her teens and early twenties. At 14 she professed to idolise Delamere, the impetuous half-mad lover who loses the heroine of Smith’s first novel, Emmeline, to a naval officer. Austen’s Catharine in ...”

“... hotel across the street from the old casino.’ Alternately drunk and on the phone to Jane Fonda, RWF declines to capitulate to the journalist’s wishes and Katz returns to his Tuscany home: ‘I was not going to win him over and was less sure by the hour that I wanted to.’ The phone rings. Fassbinder wants Katz to do his next ...”

“... latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the gardens to a shaded outdoor restaurant. Amis would barely recognise as lunch the meal most of us eat here: nobody ...”

“... did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public school. Girls, by contrast, remained where they had always been, in the ...”

“... shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison, in Percival Everett’s Erasure Race is America’s most enduring fiction. And for all the relieved, Obama-era sighing over America’s ...”

“... Marxist who ran a bookshop in a Nottingham slum in the early Sixties. ‘Women with Bicycle’ by Jane Oxenford and the brief ‘Having taken off my wheels’ by Martin Elliott both associate love and cycling, the first affectedly gloomy and terse, the second too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in ...”