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“... girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining the remarkable letters written by Mrs Thrale, the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on ...”

“... Avenue, which he nicknamed the Caviar Club, enjoying the food and the opportunities for gossip. Elizabeth Taylor was at that time involved in ‘a highly complicated romantic relationship’ with Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador to Washington, and Warhol was able to tell friends that Zahedi ‘was getting nervous about her getting ...”

“... letters of dependent family members was common, if resented. In the 1740s, the young bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson (later Montagu) was appalled to find that her mother had read and disapproved of a flippant letter she had written to her sister. Nor cou’d I imagine that I was writing what anyone wou’d read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I ...”

“... the time, and became familiar with the ideas of Southern Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose wife, Caroline Gordon, would become an astute reader of drafts of O’Connor’s stories, and a staunch literary advocate. T.S. Eliot, the great hero of the New Critics, and of the Agrarians also, inevitably loomed large too, and in an ...”

“... poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at Harvard). Their work has stood up ...”

“... University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced ...”

“... of Parma. Anchor Books, Epstein claims, ‘reshaped the publishing industry’. (Never mind that Allen Lane had been publishing quality paperbacks – including editions of Stendhal – for decades.) Epstein left Doubleday when they refused, on moral grounds, to publish Lolita. He did not think Nabokov’s novel ‘a work of genius’, but felt, as a point ...”

“... of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more sense if you see it as an attempt on Weldon’s part to ...”

“... as Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs – who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. Woody Allen parodied it as the ‘Orgasmatron’ in Sleeper. I wondered what place such a machine would have in a school. What was it that united Neill and Reich, whose close friendship is recorded in their extensive correspondence? And why would such enlightened ...”

“... a tight-knit and glamorous clique of young male poets, and included among their number the dashing Allen Tate, with whom Riding was already flirting through the mail. So when news of her great success came through, Riding jumped straight on a train to Nashville, there to meet with her friends-and-collaborators-to-be. John Crowe Ransom, then a key member of the ...”

“... to, I think it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We ...”

“... Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a twenty-year-old undergraduate named Jarrell. A published volume received respectful reviews, but it was as a critic ...”

“... subtly shifting chapter devoted to a particular pairing of characters: Owen, who is blackmailing Allen, whose daughter Priscilla has an affair with Walter, who is the mentor of Phoebe, who forges a portrait of Elizabeth, who everyone loves. One of his quieter books is Twenty Lines a Day (1988), the result of his decision ...”

“... Hopper watched Dean try to create the edgy Jett Rink by keeping his bladder full for a scene with Elizabeth Taylor, and then, after blowing his lines, dealing with his awe of Taylor by emptying his bladder in full sight of her, the crew and several thousand movie-struck onlookers. (A good moment to recall Laurence Olivier’s comment to Dustin Hoffman, who ...”

“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”