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“... an alternative method of research. Fortunately for me, from 1931, when Karen Blixen’s (alias Isak Dinesen’s) lover died in a flying accident, everything that she wrote, both fact and fiction, included strands of their relationship. Her love for Denys Finch Hatton had been obsessive and was to be so enduring that she wove and interwove ...”

“... on the cover, and so have some other books by the Baroness, written under her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Here now is another reissue, from Century Hutchinson, hard-backed and elaborately illustrated, striving to connect the book with the film, to encourage sentimental nostalgia about British settlers in Kenya and to strengthen concern about the ...”

“... the mainstream of the method, however far they wander in terms of place and period or intention. Isak Dinesen’s ‘The Monkey’ (1934) and Eudora Welty’s ‘Clytie’ (1941) are good examples to be found here. But Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ arguably starts from a Gothic setting, and even with the heroine donning her wrap to set ...”

“... a sickbed, for twenty years, wasn’t published until 1960.) McCullers admired the Gothic tales of Isak Dinesen, whom she eventually met, and the imperial, somewhat arch style of Dinesen seems to have been an influence on The Ballad of the Sad Café. This parable-novella is an acquired taste, defiantly risky and weird ...”

“... stories have remained in print. Richly exotic and fanciful, they were admired by Italo Calvino and Isak Dinesen, among others. Calvino’s favourite was ‘Amour Dure’, the story of Medea da Carpi, a Renaissance woman whose beauty destroys those who aspire to love her. ‘A Wicked Voice’, loosely based on the life of the castrato Farinelli, reworks ...”

“... a furious and rigorous discipline in order to be ready to receive it. Hannah Arendt once said of Isak Dinesen that her tales read as if they had been boiled down until they were pure essence of story, and then boiled down again: and much the same could be said of Muriel Spark, albeit from a very different philosophical recipe. It is probably not ...”

“... grotesque short fictions, parables and allegories not dissimilar to the Seven Gothic Tales that Isak Dinesen published in the same year. The Salzburg Tales are contrived with a lush, jewelled exquisiteness of technique that recurs in The Beauties and Furies, which first appeared in 1936. At one point in that novel, Coromandel, the antique-dealer’s ...”

“... metaphysical fables’ – English, maybe, in the sense that Muriel Spark was Scottish and Isak Dinesen Danish, and that Marguerite Duras was French. Byatt does not make this point, but it’s worth noticing, surely, that this minor modern tradition often attracts women writers, maybe because its minority and smallness work well with limited ...”

“... for scary, sensual, heavily made-up female geniuses. Her first book was a prize-winning life of Isak Dinesen, another fabled monster of maquillage. But she also has the sure sense of self required to meet them head on. Thurman must be considered, above all, the wiliest of Colette biographers: the most adept at playing Colette’s own game, which is all ...”

“... know.’ So, a word may call up a theme Welles shared with a writer he cared for, Robert Graves or Isak Dinesen or T.H. White, yet the commentary never takes two breaths free of the words and images it has set spinning from a theme by Welles. This performance is an indoor spectacle, in no way compelling, since ideas are never allowed to develop beyond a ...”

“... she still spends an hour every morning ‘putting her face on’, with predictably fantastical, Isak Dinesen-like results. (She once had her eyelids tattooed to look like blue-black eyeliner.) She is still in love – in a distant way – with George Clooney, though playing with the Paint program on her computer (adapted for low vision) and writing the ...”