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“... Even so, I teared up at Michelle Obama tearing up, as she said, speaking to a group of girls at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson comprehensive school in Islington: ‘All of you are jewels. When I look at a performance like this, it just reminds me that there are diamonds like this all over the world.’ She told them that they were the women who would ‘build ...”

“... a languid yellow old age, hot, perfumed and dawdling, and I prefer our Julia’s course, active, smart, burnished and braced.’ This selection of letters to an adored sister concentrates on the ‘active, smart, burnished and braced’ aspect of an ambivalent personality and pattern of life. It presents Harriet Cavendish ...”

“... every decision in her life on considerations of hygiene since, at the age of 11, she chose the smart new secondary modern over the down-at-heel grammar school. Her snobbery bounces off the mirror-image snobbery Spark assumes in her readers to make a perfect Newton’s cradle of mutual contempt. Class snobbery depends on collusion and in England it is the ...”

“... Sun, for which he wrote during the first forty years of the last century; or in the pages of Smart Set, which he edited with George Jean Nathan during the 1910s and early 1920s; or its successor, the American Mercury, which he founded with Alfred Knopf’s backing in 1923. In that mode, and on that scale, he became one of the most influential writers in ...”

“... Prix de Flore, which rewards younger, avant-garde-ish writers. Hate is the story of four people: Elizabeth Levallois, the narrator, a cultural journalist at Libération; her long-term lover, a married media academic called Jean-Michel Leibowitz; her friend Dominique Rossi, a gay activist; and William Miller, an unbalanced young man who is Dominique’s lover ...”

“... was not only very handsome but a superb athlete: Jack told a friend that he thought he was just as smart and just as athletic but he doubted that the family would ever think so. He always felt that in his father’s eyes he was only filling in for his older brother. When Jack began his political career the Kennedys were presented as a vigorous athletic family ...”

“... more sophisticated males for whom a caff is as quaint as a cloth cap, reassuring them that it is smart to be philistine if you make smug jokes about it. Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the Director, declares that the slogan is ‘absolutely magnificent’ because it is ‘targeted at a particular age group (18-35) and it certainly ...”

“... In Sittenfeld’s view, Gerhart, a reporter for the Washington Post, portrayed her subject as smart, curious, sincere, down-to-earth and compassionate. But Sittenfeld had been a fan of Laura Bush before she read Gerhart’s book, tracing her fascination to a Vogue profile in June 2001, which stressed the First Lady’s lack of pretension and disdain for ...”

“... McCarthy pointed out waspishly that the great Parisienne was no more than an appendage to Sartre. Elizabeth Hardwick took a higher tone, at least as sarcastically described by Lowell, who wrote in 1953: Elizabeth has just finished a wonderful crucifying polemic on the Second Sexe. She proves with all the eloquence of ...”

“... presumably, have been no ‘after’ picture. Worryingly, in her history of cosmetic surgery, Elizabeth Haiken ends the paragraph on Rosa Travers with a parenthesis: ‘what happened afterwards was not reported.’ At the very least, it suggests that Rosa’s misfortune did not make a fortune for her after all. Or shall we cheer ourselves up by assuming ...”

“... at speed as they zipped down the White House corridors. CJ, Josh, Donna, Sam: quick-thinking, smart, hilarious, kind – this was a world you wanted to be in! I wanted to be in Lorrie Moore world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle America, usually with disappointed middle-class lives, underwhelming husbands and dysfunctional relationships ...”

“... the reality: £4 billion over budget for Crossrail is a parsimonious bargain for the rebranded Elizabeth Line. This money is flighty, but it is very serious. It maps the territory where we might be able to pick up the threads of the General Theory of Everything. A lot of people are talking, releasing statements, providing updates, playing themselves in ...”

“... those days after the war clothes were drab; grey flannels as common as jeans today. Those who wore smart jobs, like Ken Tynan in the purple-dyed battledress he had cadged off some ex-army student, did so very consciously. But Amis wore his brown tweed jacket and cherry-red polo sweater without giving the impression of having taken any thought about them. He ...”

“... exclusion has made the genre ripe for feminist and lesbian reworking. Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elizabeth George, Mary Wings and Katherine Forrest have re-created the detective as a single or Sapphic thirty-something woman, brandishing a handgun. The shape-shifting and self-suppression which most women, and especially lesbian women, perform daily have ...”

“... on, having spent the intervening decades hoping that nobody would find out about her shamefully smart past, she has decided to tell all and to make a ‘defence of debutantes’, in a valiant but doomed attempt to get us to take them seriously. It is doomed not least because MacCarthy herself, once past the preface, can hardly keep a straight face. She is ...”