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“... in France six years ago under the title of Les Météores, but it arrives in this country, in Anne Carter’s convincing and sometimes virtuosic translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An ...”

“... year she meets Reese, who has also left an identity behind. Back in Arkansas, he was Therese Anne Carter, but in late-1970s California he takes photos, goes to the gym, takes illegal hormones, grows his blond stubble. Jude falls in love with him imperceptibly, recognising her feelings not long after walking in on him changing and glimpsing the ...”

“... I met Angela Carter in the spring of 1987 when I was a student and she a tutor on the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. My work had over the course of the previous winter gone from bad to worse. I was 24, I had no idea how to live in the world, let alone write about it; and the self who was supposed to produce some kind of narrative by the end of the year seemed increasingly fugitive and fragmented ...”

“... The​ most stimulating, balanced and sympathetic secular biography of the Prophet of Islam was written by a left-wing French Jewish intellectual in 1961. Maxime Rodinson’s Life of Muhammad was a formative influence on my generation. It seemed to be the first real attempt to come to terms with a culture that could not be understood through sacred texts or works of exegesis alone ...”

“... Angela Carter’s Black Venus is Baudelaire’s Creole mistress Jeanne Duval, whose hair the poet once likened to a sea of ebony, among other things; his enchantment and her disenchantment figure in the story, the first in an inspiriting new collection of eight by an inveterate scrutiniser of the whole romantic box of tricks ...”

“... Cavendish, whose ‘wits were turned with solitude and freedom’, the obscure and melancholy Anne Finch, Elizabeth Carter, ‘the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek’, and of course her own creation, the mute inglorious poet buried opposite the Elephant ...”

“... good novel Foreign Parts, and uses a quite different kind of prose here from her earlier work. Anne Enright moves out and away from Dublin, though Eliza Lynch’s Irishness, and her childhood in the ‘bitter town’ of Mallow, do call her home. Both take on the fiction writer’s tussle with history and biography, shaping these real lives to their own ...”

“... Lady​ Anne Glenconner has lived her life ‘in the shadow of the crown’. She is a friend of many members of the royal family and was, for thirty years, a lady in waiting to Princess Margaret. Her memoir, however, is written in the shadow of The Crown, ‘the popular Netflix series’ in which she was played by Nancy Carroll with Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret ...”

“... her journal was, after all, less private than it might have been, and certainly less private than Anne Lister’s. Anne Lister was the elder daughter of a Yorkshire squire who had fought in the War of American Independence. The deaths of four brothers had left her an heiress in her own right, and by the early years of the ...”

“... little TV clip from 1976 – shot during a visit to San Francisco by future First Lady Rosalynn Carter, then campaigning on behalf of her husband, Jimmy Carter, who was elected president that year – in which a beaming Rev. Cecil stands shoulder to shoulder with his deranged colleague, both of them warmly applauding Mrs ...”

“... Creatures. It is one of the few things Bainbridge had in common with her contemporary Angela Carter, who in the 1980s wrote a screenplay about the murder. An early version of Bainbridge’s novel was turned down by several publishers, mainly because the heroines were such ‘repulsive little creatures’. It looks explosive in a different way now. The ...”

“... Who or Debrett (Henry VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine of Aragon; 2nd, Anne Boleyn; 3rd, Jane Seymour; 4th, Anne of Cleves; 5th, Catherine Howard; 6th, Catherine Parr etc). The authors have made their own compromise, which, as the price of retaining connected prose, offers a highly selective ...”

“... was told. ‘If you were an elderly eccentric woman with bad skin, you had particular problems.’ Anne Neale, known as an ‘ill-tongued’ woman, sent for trial in 1675. Such superstitions lingered even after the building of this neoclassical edifice said to imitate the Parthenon. In 1990 the first Poll Tax hearings had the town hall in an uproar that ...”

“... come in 1980, when an opportunity seemed to open to topple the sitting president, a weakened Jimmy Carter, from the Democrat slate. Kennedy took 11 states in the primaries, but Carter was buoyed by incumbency and saw off the challenge. Since 1980 members of the extended Kennedy family have held state positions in or have ...”

“... when she sees that no one else can possibly tackle the Jabberwocky, and also understands, through Anne Hathaway’s nicely fussy performance as the White Queen, that a supposedly principled opposition to violence can be merely precious, a wimpish pose. Meanwhile the movie has begun to revolve around, and be governed by, two figures: the Red Queen and the Mad ...”