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“... Susan Sontag intended something like the book which is now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and her assistants with an eye on her preliminary sketch of its contents, it is her last book ...”

“... the male poets: they were among the poets that the male poets read. That Pope adapted a line from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, when he wrote ‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ (Essay on Man) is constantly referred to in footnotes, but editors and critics have generally fought shy of considering the impact on Pope and other poets of his time of ...”

“... Let us not glamorise or cleanse them, or avert our eyes from their lesions. Greer suggests that Anne Wharton, Rochester’s niece and an admired poet, suffered from inherited ‘primary syphilis’, showing the first symptoms in her childhood. The fact that she settled her whole estate on her husband is brought in as evidence that she might have been making ...”

“... my friend Toby Eady, an agent, who promises to make contact with Gallimard’s director of rights, Anne-Solange Noble, at the Frankfurt Book Fair the following week. On 13 October I hear from Penguin; they would like to see a copy of my translation. A week later, Anne-Solange Noble asks for a copy too. I tell her that it is ...”

“... room; religion was not to be discussed. So I was barely aware of these girls’ beliefs, until Anne Guenther arrived. Anne was a bright, good-natured woman, and I took to her immediately. I’d like to think that she also liked me, that something in my 11-year-old self attracted her apart from my spiritual ...”

“... notice of a letter which says: ‘I am sorry to hear of the trouble you are having with Princess Anne. My Doreen (19) is off the rails too ...’? In short, is what is wrong with the nation today an inability to tell people like Henry Root to get knotted? No picture of Root appears on the book jacket. Such a modesty in the immodest is not surprising, for it ...”

“... Psycho so bad when it so closely followed the original? The answer lies not least with the actors: Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn are no match for Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. Haneke’s American remake of Funny Games, even closer to the original movie in story and shot arrangement, is also inferior, and again the actors are a primary reason. The villains ...”

“... aside for a moment the ‘raunchy’ cover pictures, the breathless titles (Score! or Wicked! or Jump!), and the publicists’ emphasis on wall-to-wall sex, you do find something worth reading and worth thinking about, which is pleasure, that most ticklish of subjects. There is a particular pleasure in reading about pleasure: pleasure delayed and ...”

“... of prizes for stories that Raymond Carver described as ‘unlike any in our literature’, Jayne Anne Phillips has always written this way. Her writing territory, though recognisably American (she appeared in the 1983 issue of Granta that introduced a new kind of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in ...”

“... what ‘natives’ do when they have their ‘monthlies’, she replied: ‘Well, Sue, we swim! We jump into the nearest river and swim and swim for miles. Some of us swim for three days and some for four, but that’s what we do.’ Her account of London in the period is as sharp as anything by Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. Her phonetic transcriptions of ...”

“... Nell,​ the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, can’t imagine real words coming out of her boyfriend’s mouth. ‘When I think about him talking, all he says is: Bloke, bloke bloke bloke. Blokey bloking bloke, bloke-bloke bloking.’ The boyfriend in question, Felim, a tall, taciturn farmer’s son, built like ‘a plastic model of what-goes-where’, turns out to have an interest in choking and taking non-consensual photographs of women ...”

“... of the indomitable human spirit, we leave the theatre chastened and consoled rather than ready to jump off a cliff. Nothing, it seems, is more life-affirming than watching a bunch of our fellow humans being torn apart. This is another reason Auschwitz, it’s claimed, has nothing to do with tragedy. There is a seed of truth in this: watching tragic drama is ...”

“... The ground itself might refuse, and yield their bodies up, or if they did stay put, the wall could jump over them in the night, to put the Protestants on the other side. Whole churchyards went wandering in order to leave them behind, and these ideas of purity and aversion persist in the undisturbed Irish earth, even into modern times. When Enda Kenny praised ...”

“... of which Julian Huxley did not care to make public in his own Memories. Huxley crops up again in Anne Sebba’s life of the playwright Enid Bagnold, who as a young girl exchanged poems with him but dropped him when, in one of his letters, he tried to interest her in ‘the intimate interior arrangements of a frog’. During World War One she, too, had a ...”

“... Zandra Rhodes Victorian fantasy’, ‘an elegant Missoni knit dress’ and ‘a Thierry Mugler jump suit’. Arrival in the 16th century is signalled by a mistiness of documentation, a mistiness which may be intended to convey the quality of dream. Jessica notices ‘humble working people’ and ‘magnificently dressed aristocrats’. On the Rialto she ...”