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“... feels like a detective trying to find out what has been going on. There is a dead woman called Katherine Feldmann about whom Lillian feels guilty. It seems that in London Lillian had become something of a literary ‘groupie’. She worked for a publisher who thought Katherine his most promising writer, but Lillian was ...”

“... block and fulfil her ambition to produce a collection of stories ‘rivalling those of Colette and Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys all put together’. Angèle passes on advice from her brother Jim, a painter: ‘You have to make the problem part of the subject. So, obviously what you should do is write a story about writer’s block.’ In the cottage at ...”

“... overlooked. This book corrects that omission, giving a compelling account of the Burgundian and French contexts in which Anne was raised to be a lady of the court. Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she ...”

“... been a secret file on ‘Burns, Robt (cover code Mossgiel). Exciseman. Adverse trace: sympathy for French Revolution. Subject is sensitive and promiscuous. See verses passim.’ Politics were one thing, but did he ever long to read what government spies thought of him as a person? ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see ...”

“... already provided a setting for Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594), which alludes in detail to recent French politics, and for As You Like It (1599) and All’s Well That Ends Well (1604?); while Anglo-French relations dominate Henry VI Part 1 (c.1592), King John (1596) and Henry V (1599). The last of these ...”

“... been defined in terms of his own peculiar use of symbolism, the symbolism that Yeats got from the French poets, especially Mallarmé. In her essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ Barbara Everett has pointed out these French, echoes: the fact that, for example, ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is a kind of symbolist parody ...”

“... 1530s, the consequences foreseen and unforeseen of Henry’s ‘Great Matter’ – the problem of Katherine of Aragon and the break with the Church of Rome – are all the more shocking because the bonds of social and political solidarity which pushed Cromwell up the ladder of preferment and promotion had once been so resilient. He had no grand plan for ...”

“... new-style matrioshka can also stand for what is sometimes gained in translation. For instance, the French open up Edgar Allan Poe and out pops Baudelaire. Here, what has been lost in translation – Poe’s energetic vapidity – represents an enormous gain. Equally, the new-style doll will cover plagiarism, the original sin. For example, Baudelaire’s ...”

“... I used to know a girl called Fiona who kept a joint diary with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven’s Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van on their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, pans then carried hurriedly onto doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking funeral ...”

“... Imprisoned though he is in that wonderfully self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology: ‘I can answer the threat of the other as other (than I) only by transforming it into another (than itself) through altering it in my imagination ...”

“... about the diaries – is the relentlessness of his prejudices against the English, against the French, against (some) women, and against Jews, prejudices being one way of holding onto one’s origins; of keeping faith with the traditions one likes to think one has rejected, if only by mocking them. Isherwood’s prejudices against his family and his class ...”

“... of British culture which is associated with it. And it is that of the représentatif (as the French say – apologetically, it always seems) of a no less particular fringe of the Parisian intelligentsia (another catch-phrase). Contemporary British culture can also be said to have two main aspects. On the one hand, there is its love of the same – its ...”

“... lack of faith with equanimity, and was going on suffragettes’ marches with his only daughter, Katherine, in his eighties. Katherine, a teacher, was the only family member to go to university, and the only sibling to have consummated a relationship, marrying at the age of 52. ‘It isn’t true,’ Wilbur later ...”

“... her lover Henri de Navarre, later Henri IV, to abjure his controversial Calvinist faith, the French court was home to a series of extraordinarily influential women. As Kathleen Wellman shows in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, these royal wives and favourites made much of their proximity to the crown, exerting their influence in diverse and ...”

“... as though the rest of the world hardly existed. Yet he noted that the Godwin circle had carried French Enlightenment ideas into England and that the Pre-Raphaelites had supported the revolutions of 1848 and welcomed political refugees into their circle. Does the subversive residue always involve an ingestion and mutation of alien ideas? What were Woolf’s ...”