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“... girl-on-girl: ‘All three young women at the table watched Ava move towards the bar. Let’s be frank: Ava was wearing boot-cut jeans that afternoon and all three scrutinised and evaluated her arse as she went. Manda was looking for some avenue of criticism; but it was pretty clear there was absolutely none.’ This blokeish ‘frankness’ is also evident ...”

“... but these are really survival memoirs. A Child Called ‘It’ by Dave Pelzer, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans initiated the genre in the 1990s. They were largely read for sentimental and/or sadomasochistic reasons, for their account of hardship overcome, regardless of their literary merit (Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work ...”

“... he happened to speak well in his presence of the queen and princess, and called the concubine [Anne Boleyn] ‘ribaude’ and her daughter ‘bastard’. He has now been banished from court.‘Naturals’ were desirable, in theory, because they offered authenticity in a court world structured by dissimulation. But those who hired them didn’t have to like ...”

“... leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull’s eye, then put it in the bin. 24 May. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town Tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the Standard, he’s about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as ...”

“... Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the decade. A lifetime’s supply cost $150, and the ...”

“... touchy aggressive temper – intellectual and physical – prefigured in his father. His sister Anne seems to have been a handful as well. Like him she was known as a ‘swearer’ and ‘blasphemer of the name of God’, and in 1626, well into her fifties, she set about an unfortunate neighbour, one Prowde, with a staff and a dagger. Marlowe’s origins ...”

“... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima founded ...”

“... in order to become a simple infantryman. His best friend, Maggio, played by an impishly wiry Frank Sinatra, has just died as a consequence of the beatings meted out by a thuggish fellow soldier. Now, Prewitt plays the bugle again, offering up a personal military requiem for Maggio, a faintly bluesy lights out. The music fills the camp, and the other ...”

“... appeal. ‘He recommended one, to whom his mistress also went.’The discussion of sexuality is frank: ‘We rolled there, smoking and uneasy for some time, when Clays, with shocking calm, told me that his excessive love had made him impotent and that we would have to get up and sit talking for a while.’ It’s hard to think of a book published in the ...”

“... information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All ...”

“... Chicago love affair to the political tribulations of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for ...”

“... in the education of the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first ...”

“... part of the book) gathers together a coven of Gossips, Old Wives, Sybils, Mother Goose, Saint Anne, Little Red Riding Hood’s Granny and the Queen of Sheba. Inside the frame, ‘The Tales’ (the second half) casts a feminist gaze over Cinderella (aka Donkeyskin), Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard’s wives, the Beast’s Beauty, the Little Mermaid and the ...”

“... a friend, ‘I admit to a taste for certain affectations and ornamental commissions.’ He was as frank as he could be about his artful concealments. His extensive correspondence with his family (just over 650 pages of letters to his mother, father and maternal grandmother), taken together with Mariani’s gruelling account of the parents’ marriage, makes ...”

“... the nurses I had got to know by name (Sarah, Penelope); to some I gave names of my own (Princess Anne, the Asian Flu); most of them remained as anonymous to me as I was to them. At all times I was conscious of being the object of their professional concern, and, occasionally, of something stranger, their professional tenderness. Only at the rarest ...”