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“... The TV show got round such awkwardness by dint of hardly mentioning race at all, casting black and brown-skinned actors colour-blindly as the heroine’s husband and daughter, and (as in Hollywood convention) as the heroine’s brave – in some ways maybe too brave – best friend. But the situation of the fertile handmaid in Atwood’s novel – forcibly ...”

“... a highly-regarded writer has visited the domain of a destructive epidemic – much as she, and Jane Fonda, once visited Vietnam. Those visits probably did help in shifting consciousness; I’m not so sure about this one. The other book comes out of work on the ideology of new fashions in health-care and health-talk – work which is understood ...”

“... inviting the reader ‘to a vast and gusty demolition site … where he gives you a jam jar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels’.) In his role as host and counsellor to the young, Amis comments on his work in progress, like the narrator of London Fields, in interstitial chapters filled with writing advice and ‘what Gore Vidal used to call ...”

“... be so much a part of the story. Art simplifies but life really piles it on. Why, for instance, did Jane Anderson sue the film company for libel over the portrayal of her as Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar, thereby broadcasting to the world information about her sexuality and mental health that she was ostensibly fighting to conceal? Why does Anne Stevenson, who ...”

“... the authors’ relation to the text may not have been so different from that of an author like Jane Austen who, in John Bayley’s words, ‘set her characters going to see what they might do’, or Pushkin, who in the midst of composing Eugene Onegin wrote to a friend: ‘My Tatiana has gone off and got married. I never would have expected it of ...”

“... It is not that one doesn’t want to know about Simone de Beauvoir’s trademark turban, or Jane Gallop’s penchant for sex with 36-year-old men, or whether Mary McCarthy shaved her legs (she didn’t). But in the absence of a sustained discussion of their ideas the result is not merely to popularise but to Cosmopolitan-ise, to turn professional ...”

“... came to stand for the whole of the female body’s hidden interior. The 17th-century midwife Jane Sharp wrote that if a woman feels ‘a shivering or trembling to run through every part of her body’, she has conceived; Laurent Joubert, in 1578, that she would feel a ‘slight tightening and contraction … like a shuddering deep in the place where her ...”

“... Hatherop Castle was headed by a Mrs Fyfe:‘Was there a Mr Fyfe?’‘Yes there was,’ said Jane Longrigg, ‘but not in my time. He’d gone out on the lake one day to test the water to see if it was suitable for the girls to skate on. He fell through the ice and was never seen again. All that were found were his hat and his stick.’The women were ...”

“... the evenings and I swoon over him’. This was the Bay Area figurative painter William Theophilus Brown, who was to become an important friend. Brown and Frame translated Rilke’s French poems together (‘Stay still, if the angel/at your table suddenly decides;/gently smooth those few wrinkles/in the cloth beneath your ...”

“... Mills & Boon to greatness were the tuppenny libraries in the Thirties (for which they supplied brown-jacketed hardbacks) and the cheap, bookstore-racked paperback in the post-Sixties period. Of the two, the first is associated with Mills & Boon’s golden age. In its recent paperback form the identity of the firm has been diluted by multinational ...”

“... that the novelists often availed themselves of single traditional physiognomic correspondences: brown or black eyes are the sign of physical or moral strength; blue eyes belong to gentle characters; ‘strong characters are almost always dark-haired’ while ‘fair hair is often assigned to characters of an essentially gentle nature’ although it is ...”

“... that she must have made herself part of the furniture. It is duly noted that the menu has a brown and gold border. It is unduly noted that the menu has the date printed at the bottom. Admittedly such a thing would not happen at the nearest branch of the Golden Egg, but it is not necessarily the mark of a great restaurant. Mrs Krantz would probably hate ...”

“... Arthur Marshall girl, the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere, ‘I’ve worked with Whicker,’ ‘brown sauce straight from old Harold at Number Ten’. T.S. Eliot is said to be well-disposed to the Vardon Hall scheme in Hemlock and After. Another pointer to a certain awkwardness of stance in relation to the tradition is to be found in the excess of literary ...”

“... in which women were described and rated like horses: ‘Perfectly sound in wind and limb. A fine Brown girl rising nineteen . . . Fit for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant.’ When Wellington left Wilson to go off to the Peninsular War, his campaign orders included the instruction that ‘there shall be six women to every hundred men and these shall be drawn ...”

“... police were fumbling with handcuffs. It was this spectacle – more than the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after a violent altercation – that set off the demonstrations which continue in many American cities to protest against the mistreatment and killing of citizens with impunity. The Senate Select Committee report on CIA detention and ...”