“... too empty of ‘disagreeables’, as Tom Paulin once said about the interestingly comparable Angela Carter. Instead of finding a way at least to acknowledge that travel in the 21st century for millions of people is forced, she dots her book with anecdotal extracts from a well-worn history of anatomical curiosities: Chopin’s heart, pickled in ...”

“... he liked and commissioned Mary McCarthy and V.S. Pritchett and William Empson and V.S. Naipaul and Angela Carter and Penelope Fitzgerald. (McCarthy was the subject of another life lesson. He and she once, at a party, got into a conversation about the negative reviews of their own books. ‘Well,’ Karl said, ‘it’s not necessarily so bad as all ...”

“... device before in Flesh and Blood (1994), and her erotic reworking of saint’s tales also recalls Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. In Carter’s stories, the gory Gothic chamber in which Bluebeard pleasures and butchers his wives is also a metaphor of the womb, the bloody centre of female sexuality and ...”

“... was one of an embarrassing number of prominent Bay Area leftie muckety-mucks (Jerry Brown, Angela Davis and the soon-to-be-assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were others) bedazzled by the ghoulish Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple cult, Elvis-style drug addict, ambisexual ...”

“... distress, what is? Generations of feminists have asked the question never expressed better than by Angela Carter in the LRB in 1980: ‘Why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J-P?’At the end of the first year of the Sartre-Beauvoir pact – marked by that first experience of jealousy, which she dispelled by ...”

“... Raymond and Katharine Asquith. Two years later, when Violet and her husband ‘Bongie’ Bonham Carter were laughing about Lloyd George’s behaviour, Margot was reminded of ‘that same laughter that rung down the river the night of the pleasure-party steamer when Denis Anson was drowned (the spectators went to bed and the opera while their friend’s body ...”