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“... of his co-ordinates are firmly fixed in the cultural map of ‘then’. He was born in the year of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network ...”

“... of, say, Macmillan to know that he sought solace in his private hours with the works of Livy and Jane Austen, what can one say about someone who, after spending much of her day ranting at her ministers, her civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books ...”

“... onto Limerston Street, and the back garden of the man who had been best man at his wedding: Karl Miller. Karl and Jane, his wife, had been Cambridge contemporaries of Hugh’s, and Hugh and Karl both wrote for Granta. They contributed to a 1952 issue, edited and illustrated by Mark Boxer; so did Thom Gunn and Eric ...”

“... good’ to ‘some good’ to ‘no good’ to ‘absolutely no bloody good at all’). So Jane Austen, both men agreed, is ‘not all that good’. The reason Kingsley gave, with which Hitchens concurs, is that she had an ‘inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major’. Having just tried to ...”

“... and of being somewhere’. After an electroencephalogram, an American psychiatrist called Dr Miller told her that her brainwaves were ‘“more normal than normal”, thus shattering my long-held acquaintance and kinship with Van Gogh, Hugo Wolf’. She had never suffered from schizophrenia, she was told. Instead, her current symptoms were the ...”

“... and on television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course ...”

“... having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment ...”

“... Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen Gray; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene ...”