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“... with old religious or monastic connections (the Whitefriars, the Minories, St Martin le Grand, St Katherine by the Tower), was one of London’s quasi-autonomous ‘liberties’, and so not governed by the lord mayor. The second was that there had already been a theatre in the area, immediately adjacent to the building on which Burbage’s carpenters were now ...”

“... who lived in Newport and may also have been shipped aboard the Phillis. Together they formed what Katherine Clay Bassard has called the ‘earliest Black women’s writing community’.At the same time, Wheatley was beginning to draw power from her singularity as an African writer. ‘She becomes a colonial informant,’ as Waldstreicher puts it, ‘a highly ...”

“... this biography. There is a slightly disagreeable implication that this biographer, in spite of the sharp things she says about ‘Lily’, is taking over her job. She is always seeking intimacy, and in her quest for it she shows herself over-fond of words like ‘empathy’ and ‘empathise’; by claiming these qualities she means to advertise her sympathetic ...”

“... marked by extended separation from his family, a seemingly ungenerous will, glimpses of financial sharp practice and social-climbing ambition); but on these unpromising foundations surprisingly elaborate constructions are erected, whether shaped by the genial indulgence of what Simon Russell-Beale called Greenblatt’s ‘love letter’ to Shakespeare, or by ...”

“... Clark is a sympathetic and credible witness, she is no pussycat. She has some particularly sharp words for Dorothy Farnan, Kallman’s father’s girlfriend and then, after Kallman’s death, wife. (Chester used to refer to her as ‘Miss Mistress’.) ‘Some friends say that Dorothy ... was in love with Chester and only took his father as ...”

“... went with them. Mary was indeed brilliant, intellectual, literary; she was also cool, sometimes sharp-tongued, and inclined to be depressive. Claire sang beautifully, was witty, energetic, high-spirited and given to tantrums. Some years later Shelley, his longings temporarily directed elsewhere, would characterise them as the ‘cold moon’ and the ...”

“... with a speck or two of blood on his collarband, ‘his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untunable’. He was noticed at first only for the violence of his speech, and was reproved by the House for his language; several of his hotter rants against the bishops were excised from the record. But these must have been the qualities that drew a ...”

“... about Brodie’s Fascist sympathies. Similar acts of girlish ressentiment roil the works of Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Plath, Daphne Du Maurier, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jolley, Sybille Bedford and many others. Female autobiographers have been similarly forthright about such hatreds – if less so about the pleasures of posthumous ...”

“... leave signatures or detailed financial records’ – and there is indeed about him a touch of the sharp or slippery businessman. He broke usury laws by charging excessive interest on loans, and contravened trading regulations by buying up large quantities of wool. What catches the eye is not the illegality, which is standard enough, but the sums of money ...”

“... the novel along with many of Jackson’s other fixations. The story is told by the adolescent Mary Katherine Blackwood, ‘Merricat’, whom Oates in her essay compares with other precocious, tomboyish figures in American literature of the same period – Frankie in The Member of the Wedding or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Oates doesn’t push these ...”

“... real talent but no real terrain. He lacked Flannery O’Connor’s steely wit or Eudora Welty’s sharp knowledge of her neighbours. It is interesting that the name Flannery O’Connor never once appears in his letters; she would have put the fear of God into Capote. Capote’s short fiction has all the whimsicality of late Faulkner. The best two ...”

“... to submit his own plate, now in its ninth state as he sought for perfection, capsized the project. Katherine Cassatt, Mary’s mother, certainly knew whom to blame. Degas, she wrote, ‘got them all to work for [the journal] so that Mary had no time for painting and as usual with Degas when the time arrived it appears he wasn’t ready ... Degas is never ready ...”

“... another 1938 recording, could be his warning to all songwriters. His ad libs can be funny and sharp social commentary, too, as in his apostrophe to an otherwise pretty gal, ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ (1939), when Waller adds, grandly, at the end, ‘Your pedal extremities really are obnoxious.’ His is the compensatory pomposity of ...”

“... school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V. Woolf, K.A.P.[Katherine Anne Porter], Bowen, R. West etc – they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first – and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say. The ...”