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“... How best to touch these woody objects or a person?     She batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T – and she spun one.     She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalised inscribed plaque dedicated to MY DEAREST NANCY ...”

“... All Day Rainbow SwirlWe had our shoes off and maybe this was a place where we were washing for gold, somewhat lost in the world.       I see myself at my ease fifty years ago in this old photograph, and I have held on to a vial of gold dust – I don’t know where it is – and a ruby – a ruby crumb really. It is red.       She had begged us – the woman in the picture – to take her along ...”

“... Seated WomanOh, I had my worm’s eye view of him when I was down on the carpet to pick up my ink pen that had slipped off of my lap when I stood. I saw the canopy of his jaw, his jawbones.God … will I never know if I make things better for Victor?I would need to go along with him and there was no denying he was piqued, and I was putting up resistance ...”

“... The bird’s voice was such a thick voice – it could never have been carried away by the high wind. It was a passionate voice that might have answered the question, ‘What am I living for?’ – had there only been words to accompany it.And I did get to see the bird out on a limb, opening and closing its mouth, its breast pulsing.Ruby had said, There is the bird that is singing!Perhaps we had gotten this far flung once before, where we found the beautiful tassel rue that has such an ugly common name – false bugbane – together with large and sharp, saw-toothed leaves ...”

“... With this New Greasiness One of them breaks the routine at the office usually – mouths off or is sullen, every once in a while. The man said, ‘You know why I’m here, Jane.’ Jane grabbed at the man where some soft flesh is, with some force, perhaps because so many persons were no longer in her life – not Titus or Roddy, Mamie or Cecelia Bouché – whom she had checked in with and needed to double-check in with often, to help her to settle down ...”

“... Perform Small Tasks ‘One second!’ I said – for everything can go cold in a day or hot. For a man like me, there’s an on and off bulb that does the deciding. I had to find a red, little glowing button – that I was able to find – that was on a timer switch, to get more light on. The furniture – like worn-out stumps sticking up – had turned into shadows ...”

“... Rushing​ out of the house for an appointment, I grabbed what I thought was Diane Williams’s Collected Stories. When I retrieved the book from my bag, I was surprised to find it was actually the latest volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters: they’re both large hardbacks whose pale jackets are touched with baby blue ...”

“... who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing ...”

“... There’s​ a very short story by Diane Williams which came into my mind while I was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and it’s 104 words long. It ends: ‘For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly ...”

“... an argument about the handwriting of his stick-up note. In Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) the Diane Keaton character has a wild idea and is advised to save some of her craziness for the menopause. The style of joke Allen borrows so often from S.J. Perelman works in much the same way. A man disguised as a cat burglar is arrested by a couple of dogs dressed ...”

“... had been great. For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, the new house is named Princess Diane; or The Princess for short. (Likely – I already see – to morph into La Principessa in Mapp and Lucia moods.) A classic double-decker San Francisco ‘Painted Lady’ – meaning a late 19th-century wooden domicile of cheesy touristic charm (and, some ...”

“... the tears, everyone burst into peals of laughter. Classic Rih.When he suffers a detached retina, Diane Von Furstenberg steps in to help him skip the queue and secure an appointment with the most in-demand eye surgeon. His OBE party is organised by Naomi Campbell. ‘Naomi had booked a suite at Claridge’s to throw a lunch for my family. It was a Sunday ...”

“... recognition gave him courage and confidence. The following year, rejected by Yale, he decided on Williams. Once there, he scarcely attended classes, preferring to spend his time in the library. After a year, he moved back to New York, eventually taking a job in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. He begged his father to send him to Paris, and a few ...”

“... And who is being diverted, in any case? Here, after all, is a four-hundred-page book, welcomed by Diane Eyer, the author of Mother-guilt: How Our Culture Blames Mothers for What’s Wrong with Society, with essays from 26 contributors, many of whom have written elsewhere on the subject, and who run classes and clinics to help us with it. Still, there is ...”

“... know-your-place remarks of the sort made by Michael Fallon to Andrea Leadsom, or by David Davis of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected in ...”