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“... anecdote will give some idea of the general tone of the book. In February 1984, Adams and Colette, his wife, were in Clones in County Monaghan, just south of the border, when three men with machine-guns burst into the bedroom where the couple were sleeping late. The men turned out to be Irish police officers. Adams complained about the ...”

“... in the fighting. But the best and most enjoyable example of this synthetic style is the one-act Colette opera, L’Enfant et les sortilèges, from the mid-1920s. The child in question is a naughty little boy who refuses to do his homework and, when scolded by his mother, smashes the crockery, stabs the pet squirrel with his pen nib, pulls the cat’s ...”

“... middle-aged medium, works the dormitory towns of the M25, accompanied by her prim assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, whom Alison describes to her audience as a former circus clown, ‘a darling little bloke, always laughing, tumbling, doing his tricks’. The séances make cloying reading, deliberately so: this is the public, sanitised ...”

“... much of the fun arises from his knowing everybody. There is an excellently observed portrait of Colette, her odd choices of food at luncheon: ‘she talked of fish and the superior intelligence of the pike. Her mother, she said, had a tortoise called Charlotte, which slept throughout the winter. There came a day every year when she heard her mother call ...”

“... and to gain a reputation for prodigious expertise, is to subject your characters to the Colette process: i.e. to observe their foibles with immense sympathy and comprehension but to deliver your narration from the winning side. What a writer has learned from this process is only to be guessed at: probably never to confess to a failure. The ...”

“... remarkable: the trilogy on ‘female genius’, represented by Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and Colette (1999-2002), and the wonderful novel about Teresa of Avila, Thérèse mon amour (2008).Jardine says her book is not a hagiography, and it isn’t. But she does see Kristeva as offering a model of ‘how to live a thinking life’ in the second half of the ...”

“... to write fiction for real, a red-faced, intellectually patrician Willy patronising his own cool Colette. Brightman’s account of their marital battles is even-handed, and as I’ve said depends in part on the view that McCarthy, while not clinically mad (as he tried at moments to make out), was monstrous in her own right. Another ingredient, I imagine, is ...”

“... of Laure’s work appeared, thanks to the efforts of her nephew, Jérôme Peignot, in 1977. Born Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot in 1903, Laure spent most of her childhood and adolescence in her parents’ estate in Dammarie, just outside Paris. Jérôme Peignot describes Dammarie as ‘a pleasant place. In front of the house, a great lawn surrounded by ...”

“... interesting, though heavily indebted to Grant Richards. Housman read Proust and James; he enjoyed Colette; he much admired the work of Edith Wharton. Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of ...”

“... irregular contributor. She could deliver, Clapp recalls, ‘with equal pungency on the ANC and on Colette’, when, that is, she delivered at all. Though notoriously disinclined to housework (‘people would come in and write 1789 in the dust’), she was willing to do anything, up to and including ironing sheets, to avoid a deadline. In the course of a ...”

“... to women writers of an earlier generation – Virginia Woolf (b. 1882), taught by private tutors; Colette (b. 1872), who left school at seventeen – than to someone of her time.In the summer of 1943, after the Allied invasion of southern Italy and the overthrow of Mussolini, the Germans occupied Florence. To escape Allied bombardment, Campo and her parents ...”

“... with perfect attention, to a prodigious memory. His passion for literature is present in pieces on Colette, (‘the wise, white witch of the Palais Royal, most earthy of oracles’) and in pieces on Updike, Balzac, Henry James, written with an authority and perception based on lifelong intimacy. He applied the same seriousness with which he encouraged new ...”

“... with Grand Duke Dmitri, Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster among others, the friendships with Colette and Cocteau and Diaghilev among others, the parties and dinners in great houses, the passionate attachment to Misia Sert, the passionate aversion to Schiaparelli and other rivals, the whole decorative panoply of Chanel’s intense connection with ...”

“... simple little braided suits, her last style, with which her name is indissolubly associated. Colette, in 1932, described Chanel’s solitary rages of creation, pulling, slashing, discarding, muttering a monologue in which no one dared to join. Twenty-two years later, her revenge – and it was seen as a revenge – was absolute, and she was finally ...”

“... 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands may flatten against both cheeks (Lily Brik-Mayakovsky, 1954), interlock over the belly (Harold Macmillan, 1967), rise above the head to twist the hair ...”