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“... vistas of cloud rolling through cable-thick greenery where strange birds called. ‘Of course,’ Sarah said. And added, almost provocatively, ‘the heart has its reasons’. ‘Is that another allusion?’ She didn’t answer but drew on the cigarette. This was still the time when it was fashionable and mature to smoke, and in such a fashion. The silence ...”

“... from the novels, restricted to the work of seven novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the ...”

“... they stopped at a pub en route, emerged blind-drunk, and crashed the car into a scholartree. Sarah Lubman recently explained in the Washington Post that Chinese students are the victims ‘of an educational system which presents limited – and biased – information about the West’, but my student at least had merely been reading some American ...”

“... to confess during this early phase of the witchhunt. Of her two co-defendants at the beginning, Sarah Good denied everything, Sarah Osborne accused Sarah Good. The self-owned witch Tituba has consequently become, in the ever-swelling literature about the horrors of Salem, the catalyst ...”

“... residence with stags’ heads in the hall. In the dining room there were laptops everywhere. Sarah Harrison, Assange’s personal assistant and girlfriend, was wearing a woolly jumper and kept scraping her ringlets off her face. Another girl, maybe Spanish or South American or Eastern European, came into the drawing room where the fire was blazing. I ...”

“... fit his philosophical and religious beliefs, poetic practice and dissolute life into a whole. His death in 1680 seemed so aptly emblematic of the lack of cohesion in his character that it has claimed undue attention. The most notorious rake of his age spent the last few months of life in discussion of Christian doctrine. A poet who could not have been more ...”

“... and several hundred pages, for the heroine to confront the fact of her mother’s suicide. In Death of a River Guide (1994), on the other hand, the protagonist’s sorrows reflect a more public tragedy. Drowning under a waterfall, Aljaz Cosini – the somewhat dyspeptic narrator – is assailed by fitful visions of his family history, which is also a ...”

“... being played by Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford. (Or, judging from the picture on the cover of Sarah Bakewell’s book, Veronica Lake. Except that it isn’t of Mrs Rudd – a publishing imposture to follow on the heels of so many other impostures in this story.) The supporting characters include a tight-fisted, thin-skinned and ill-tempered admiral (with ...”

“... fancy shapes after dinner’). He was ‘patchily informed about the Old Masters’, according to Sarah Walden, ‘and seems to have taken surprisingly little trouble to familiarise himself with their works or techniques’. Except for a trip to the Netherlands to study Hals, he never joined in pilgrimages to aesthetically hallowed sites, but looked at ...”

“... of this mood in Afrikaans fiction as ‘an intimation of apocalypse, which implies not just the death of the individual or the end of his hopes, but the destruction of the entire known world or way of life’. All the same, it warns: ‘If the outline of a map of contemporary South African writing does seem to emerge, the map should be used ...”

“... documented here, both in an introduction by John Weightman and in a postscript on the ‘Life and Death of Emile Ajar’ which Gary left behind at his death, by suicide, in 1980. Weightman dilates on the ‘cliquish’ nature of Parisian literary politics, and Gary himself confirms that it was the arbitrary and vindictive ...”

“... his seat, until, brought before the Ottoman authority and given the alternative of apostasy or death, he ‘took the turban’, became an official in the Turkish service, and ended his days not uncomfortably in an exile’s residence at Dulcigno (Ulcinj) on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. I find, however, that as soon as I attempt to write the story ...”

“... donkeys constantly. During this time she attempted several novels – ‘The Pink Sphinx’, ‘Death Comes for the Yaya’, ‘Women Travelling Alone’ – but they all ended up in the drawer.No Clouds of Glory, her first published novel, came out in Canada in 1968 and was reissued in the US six years later as ...”

“... alone echoes in the France of the Liberation with an emotional charge equal to that of Verdun.’ Sarah Farmer’s account of Oradour’s destruction is muted: Four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town of Oradour in the rolling farm country of the Limousin and rounded up its inhabitants. In the marketplace they divided the ...”

“... health and fortune that haunts her fiction was the product of experience. Unexplained decline and death is a common plot device. It is easy to smile at the narrative convenience of these obscure illnesses, but Wood’s much-loved grandfather, the foundation of the family’s fortune, died just as many of her characters do – of an illness which ‘baffled ...”