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“... dealings with one another while no woman is present: in this she resembles the more hard-hearted Patricia Highsmith. It is not until page 58 that a woman appears – and then she is presented as a shrewish wife. In fact, all three of the principal females are seen as shrewish wives: yet somehow, with considerable subtlety, Anita Desai has written a ...”

“... Yaddo to revise his prison novel, but spent much of his time getting drunk, and trying to seduce Patricia Highsmith, a 26-year-old Barnard graduate from a Texas slaveholding family who ‘consistently tried to tackle Chester on his own turf: evil and sexuality’. Himes was writing about his affair with Rico while ...”

“... can take seriously a writer who disguises inventive thinking in spy capers and gun-plots, or, like Patricia Highsmith, in the simplest murders, whereas I can only laugh at someone of comparable cleverness who’s into chemises and silk shifts. Formally, there shouldn’t be a difference. It’s a genre: games are played with it. But historical romance ...”

“... textbook now features a liturgical calendar, its red-letter days including ‘the Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Kahlo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ...”

“... daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her first feature film, The Two Faces of January, adapted from Patricia Highsmith. (The casting director has claimed to have been unaware of who she was, even though the film is being produced by Working Title, Tim Bevan’s production company.) Lynn said there was a gene running through all the Redgraves with a ...”

“... Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He recommended the young and unpublished Patricia Highsmith to Yaddo in 1948. In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he ...”

“... lived: ‘She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus)./She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm)./And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.’ These curtailed, interrupted, suspended activities correspond to a present tense that has been abruptly abolished. Mourning is a wound ...”

“... the gallery owner Betty Parsons – even the kooky, spooky, more-than-a-little-ropey Patricia Highsmith, a gothic late-life pal, intriguingly, of Murphy’s. It’s true that the polyamorous de Acosta accounted for many, if not most, of the downright sexual conquests here. To read about her star-studded sex life is to be reminded of those ...”

“... she thought I should include: most interestingly, perhaps, her favourite steamy love scene from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price of Salt. As far as Sontag was concerned, Highsmith’s dykey little potboiler – published originally under a pseudonym – was right up there with Buddenbrooks ...”