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“... to her own brother. Others, less sure of themselves, fall through the cracks. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s troubled daughter, given to ‘acting up, setting her hair on fire’, is packed off to Switzerland to be ‘stilled, in a straitjacket’. Hazel, Peggy’s younger sister (always late, forgetful, bewildered), ends up in a New York institution ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or have worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called ...”

“... a felicitous ending for it on her deathbed. Susan Sontag’s idea of Paris came from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Harriet Sohmers, a fellow student, had picked her up at the University of California by asking her if she’d read it. Sontag had, many times, and the reward for passing this test of a pick-up line was an introduction to San Francisco’s ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the use of ...”

“... a letter to Edmund Gosse, ‘I shall be very pleased indeed to hand on the subscription to the Barnes memorial’; continued a few lines later, ‘As to despondency I have known the very depths of it – you would be quite shocked if I were to tell you how many weeks & months in bygone years I have gone to bed wishing never to see daylight again’; then ...”

“... is pulling out his cock and comparing it with those writers with whom he will be compared’ – James Joyce, Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace. ‘I will be compared to nobody.’ She spends weeks having ‘an existential crisis’ because ‘only one of us can be called an artist.’ Since this part of the book is more essayistic, and Zambreno seems be to ...”

“... rants (trashing the proles), small revenges. The Modernist experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations ...”

“... the marketplace off against the sophisticated abstraction of ‘cognisance’. Realism,​ Julian Barnes says, is ‘essentially corrective’, and if you ask what Browning’s realism seeks to correct the answer is rather peculiar: it is the idea that the world is same-old-same-old. The beautifully poised way that Browning deploys the very word ...”

“... Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.’ How is Amis getting on in this notional academy? In ...”

“... of fun) who keeps cropping up in memoirs of the Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social scene, setting hearts ...”

“... magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy Compton-Burnett, the gallery owner Betty Parsons – even the kooky, spooky, more-than-a-little-ropey Patricia Highsmith, a gothic late-life ...”

“... translates tagliatelle as ‘noodles’, which would hardly be felt necessary today). Julian Barnes, in a tough and very thorough review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, summed up the issue: ‘If you want the book in “English”,’ he asks, ‘what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning suggest, as a mutation of county philistinism rather than a populist affectation.* His social liberalism, when not merely the product of good manners, seems to be a recent acquisition, while his mind-broadening PR job at Carlton TV was, Elliott and ...”