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“... Wolton’s service at the end of June. Their route lay east and southwards, through Reims, Metz, Nancy and Dijon to Lyon. In each city they set up a riding space in the yard of an inn or on a patch of grass, publicised Wolton’s bareback tricks and tried to sell enough tickets to keep them going until the next performance. Breaking even was a ...”

“... Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running lament for the novel, which Vidal sees as being in deep trouble. From 1956 ...”

“... Reveille with Beverly is a now largely forgotten 1943 film starring Ann Miller and the great Franklin Pangborn. Worked up from an equally forgotten US radio series it’s a corny but percipient tale about a spunky young DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive ...”

“... at the age of 15. Family relationships were complicated by the fact that their father, Frederick Miller, an American, had married his step-mother’s niece, Clara; Agatha’s step-grandmother was therefore also her great-aunt. They settled in a large villa on the outskirts of Torquay. In the morning Frederick would walk to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, drink ...”

“... art is not in opposition to reason’), she began writing for the London Magazine, then for Karl Miller at the New Statesman (and, eventually, the LRB). Ian Hamilton called her ‘Britain’s foremost literary shrew’. She was a strong, funny critic. She lost patience with Virginia Woolf’s novels (‘too devastatingly vague’) on discovering that ‘she ...”

“... Though Woolson is equivocal at best about the talent of the woman – Ettie Macks, the Daisy Miller-like heroine of ‘The Street of the Hyacinth’ (1882), abandons her painting after the third male authority convinces her that it is ‘insufferably bad’ – she is consistent about the failings of the man, who has excellent taste, a quietly refined ...”

“... be decorated for gallantry. This book has been put together from conversations recorded by John Miller and John Powell for the BBC. They were delightful broadcasts: talking off the cuff, Gielgud rambled backwards and forwards over his life; he rarely paused and then needed only the gentlest nudge to set him off again, bowling down the years. Cut together ...”

“... regardless of social status. So I was still capable of being shocked in my twenties when I read in Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love (a novel not I think mentioned by Laura Freeman) of the ration-dodging suppers available to the upper and middle classes, but also of delight when the Bolter’s lover turns out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too ...”

“... these benefits even when they are entitled to them.(This ruling is the latest handiwork of Stephen Miller, the 33-year-old senior policy adviser who is the architect of the Muslim ban, the separation of children from their parents at the border and the drastic reduction in the number of refugees admitted into the country. He has created new regulations and ...”

“... Here it must be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated ...”

“... Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most ...”

“... and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later in December 1954, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford: I went up to Oxford and visited my first homosexual love, Richard Pares, a don at All Souls. At 50 he is quite paralysed except his mind and voice, awaiting deterioration and death. A wife and four daughters, no private fortune. He would have been ...”

“... Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord chancellor. About the sport itself Nancy Mitford, no opponent of hunting, was both perceptive and unsentimental: The next day we all went out hunting. The Radletts loved animals, they loved foxes, they risked dreadful beating to unstop their earths, they read and cried over Reynard the Fox, in ...”

“... having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment ...”