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“... times proposed marriage to women he had just met. ‘What I am really asking you,’ he wrote to Anne Popham, ‘is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man. If things remain more or less as they are there is a certain amount of fun in this, as you would probably get royalties coming in and you might find it interesting to edit unpublished ...”

“... tree, too, has its plaque; it is a living memorial, planted on 12 June 1998: ‘To commemorate Anne Frank and all the children killed in wars and conflicts this century.’ The plaque quotes from Frank’s diary: ‘I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one ...”

“... the hand. In her own poetry and in her travel book Journey to the Underworld the compiler has been frank, even insistent about the breadth of her own sexual experience; she likes to be photographed in poses that make the most of her bosom. She has gone about her compiler’s task with great diligence, rescuing from the realms of obscurity many authors who ...”

“... happy, when she had last not been nervous. But it is not just women who are the victims in Smile: Frank, in ‘Making hay’, has just learned that he has leukaemia and can’t bring himself to tell anyone, least of all his childless, highly-strung Hungarian wife, Dorizia, who would ‘smother him in her arms and soak him with her tears’. In a field, he is ...”

“... hit a spell of turbulence. As Buerkle explains, early attempts to portray Salomon as another Anne Frank had served her well enough in the 1960s. The presentation of her work and life in terms of a Jewish catastrophe was always implicit in the curating, but for this approach to work the notion of innocence – or at the very least bourgeois German ...”

“... War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of ...”

“... Jayne Anne Phillips’s first novel of more than a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the course of some fifty years. From the perspective, by turns, of parents and children, she contemplated the complexities and banalities of relations among family members against the political background of the time, focusing on the far-ranging effects that were brought to bear by the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War ...”

“... been invoked at all? Would not the work in question be yet more authoritative and persuasive as frank documentary or autobiography? At the centre of Have the men had enough?, a relentlessly monocentric work, is Grandma, who suffers from senile dementia. In the moderate stage of the illness she still remembers the names and faces of those close to her, and ...”

“... popular biography of Thackeray we have had in the last nine years, taking its place alongside Anne Monsarrat’s Thackeray: Uneasy Victorian (1980) and Margaret Forster’s sprightly ‘autobiography’, Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (1978). (Rather meanly, Peters leaves both competitors out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three ...”

“... set out in a densely written ‘Prologue’ bristling with structuralist terminology. Frank Kermode, who admires the book, points out in his foreword that Anglo-Saxon readers are likely to find this introductory section difficult, and its manner unfamiliar. The warning is fair. Nevertheless, like Evans’s theory of ‘discrepant ...”

“... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...”

“... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...”

“... works of art: his cadences return in Pound’s Pisan Cantos; he appears as a blonde in a poem by Frank O’Hara; he becomes the name of a band, the Cocteau Twins. It’s as if he can beam into other worlds, as his voice does, through radio, in his 1950 film Orphée, transmitting from an elusive elsewhere. Cocteau’s life, as Arnaud tells it, mirrors these ...”

“... allegations of misbehaviour lost Kevin Spacey his job on House of Cards, he made a video as Frank Underwood, the scheming fictional president he played in the series, and this video was so creepy as to make him seem deranged. ‘You trusted me,’ he said, addressing the camera in silky menace mode. ‘Even though you knew you shouldn’t. So we’re ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers ...”