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“... she was black, would pray for a transformation each night and in the morning ‘run to the looking-glass … to see if the miracle had happened ’. Later on, she envied them their lives – ‘they had a better time than we did’; and wondered whether, being Catholics, they also had ‘a better chance in eternity’. Above all, she envied them because they ...”

“... on what has gone before. In ‘Out of the Fray’, an uneasy pre-marital visit to London ends with Ruth watching her husband-to-be asleep and thinking: ‘She understood that when he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on.’ In that sentence, the word ‘understood’ helps to make Mary Gordon seem to be endorsing an ...”

“... monk, the virgin and the orphan – become archetypes: his ‘gentle orphan girl’ is the Hebrew Ruth, a Christian martyr and a contemporary victim of sexual murder: Returning home The shepherds found the sweet body Decayed in the thorn-bush. The poet is the scarred victim: I am a shadow far from sombre villages, God’s silence I drank from the spring in ...”

“... destroyed a number of his poems in November of that year, ‘confine him to the brew-houses,/The glass-house, dye-vats and their furnaces.’ Cain and Connolly don’t note this echo, but it does help date this poem, and is a good indicator of how rambunctiously Herrick could transform his master. He implicitly compares himself to the fiery element that had ...”

“... a model for Clarissa. Astell has been called ‘England’s first feminist’ in a good book by Ruth Perry, where she is also shown to have been (like Richardson) generally conservative in religion and politics.* Like some other critics, Mrs Harris reads Richardson’s novels in the context of Locke’s rebuttal of Filmer’s theories of government, and of ...”

“... and practical difficulties ... Years later it was Georgie who was to warn Rogers’s second wife, Ruth, not to marry him as he would expect her to look after him every minute of the day, just as Dada had cared for Nino. Dada and Nino being his parents. Georgie had also been his draughtsman, and his inability to draw was still a problem. ‘How can we be ...”

“... never came back. The divorce was ‘loud’. Neither parent wanted Barbara and her younger sister, Ruth, so they were made wards of court. Her father later took his own life. Her mother, who had legal custody of the girls, ‘was busy dating’ and her second marriage to a man from ‘a working-class family unfamiliar with Jews and apparently not very fond of ...”

“... crepe and rayon jersey, one of those new wonder easy-care fabrics, and with its pattern of clear glass and silver beads the dernier cri in art deco. From the museum’s point of view the Tinne Collection is a wonderful historical resource, which includes some rare early examples of brassieres, and, as Rushton puts it, it allows one to see ‘a broad range of ...”

“... at being seen, while Didion, next to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is balanced between a whisky glass and a lit cigarette, looking at Quintana. The difficulties are already inscribed in the dry air between them.Maybe we only begin to understand our families when we recognise the stories we can’t bear to tell about them. Didion would one day write an ...”

“... his various rented attics, and by keeping his successive (and sometimes simultaneous) lovers – Ruth Bowman, Monica Jones, Patsy Strang, Maeve Brennan, Betty Mackereth – at arm’s length, he managed to preserve not only the sense of freedom that was necessary for his poems, but the connection to Eva that nourished them. Booth even goes so far as to ...”

“... Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and streamlining and, in the north, in Pomerania, along the Baltic shore, a mighty sculptural brick architecture derived from the cathedrals and warehouses of the Hansa. It was found in the Netherlands in the compelling futurism of Michel de Klerk. Had de ...”

“... suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at ...”

“... Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage I could act, but people said I ...”

“... too; we all would. It takes place in a paperweight. ‘A coloured spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life.’ A young aristocrat, 75 per cent composed of foraged mushrooms, asks his pristine parents what an erection is, and they tell him that Tolstoy has died. Who can’t relate? But while these early impressions are documented ...”

“... which is illustrated in the book, and some of his Welsh landscapes. I don’t care for his stained glass, though churches are always proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing ...”