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“... But the book is a bloody masterpiece. Schenkar doesn’t stint on showing the worst: the farcical Grand Guignol of Highsmith’s four-year affair with Ellen Blumenthal Hill, for example, who after one gruesome fight with Highsmith in Manhattan in 1954 tried to kill herself by downing several martinis and a whopping dose of Veronal. As Hill started to pass ...”

“... of his argument, he sets out to emulate it. He there asks an equivalent question about Emerson and Sarah Hale, the author of ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and of the novel Northwood, and the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. And he comes up with a similar answer: ‘If Emerson has been canonised and Hale has not, part of the reason has to do with the ...”

“... had devoted her life; but she had never, of course, advocated marriage across the class divide. Sarah, the Huxley family’s senior maid, threatened to expose the relationship.In one respect Murray’s account is less informative than David King Dunaway’s in Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Dunaway, unlike Murray, spoke to Rosalind Bruce Huxley, Leonard’s ...”

“... always much nastier about each other than any other people I know are about their colleagues,’ Sarah observes in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), Drabble’s first novel. ‘I hate anyone to be didactic except me.’ ‘Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.’In comparison with lines like ...”

“... hand-wringing in the 19th century over the perilous sanitary consequences, to Europe, of the grand imperial transport projects for which Europe was largely responsible. The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was ...”

“... it a drawing-room with blue-grey walls and reproduction furniture in a Louis XV style, including a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there ...”

“... happy with the film), Weatherby declined an offer from two set photographers to take him to the Grand Canyon, and headed off instead to New Orleans. Desegregation was about to begin and a social explosion was expected in the city. This drama – ‘in reality instead of in a movie’, as he puts it – would, he thought, be a way of getting Hollywood and ...”