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“... Jacques-Louis Ménétra was an 18th-century glazier who worked for abbesses, for aristocrats, and for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s landlord. Like Rousseau, but unlike any other artisan of his time, Ménétra has left an account of an adventurous life, full of journeyman’s wanderings, picaresque characters and amorous conquests. In his 19th year the aspiring craftsman left his embattled Parisian family for the artisan’s traditional tour de France ...”

“... certainly revealed enough to show that the trail he blazed is worth further exploration. Professor Smith is in much more of a hurry to draw wide conclusions from the examination of a particular case. Her book deals with the wives of the textile families of the Nord and is restricted to about forty families. She has an interesting story to tell. In the first ...”

“... to the game. The unnamed hero of ‘Joe Laughed’ seems like the boy the eponymous hero of Kieron Smith, Boy would have gone on to be. At the end of Kelman’s new novel, Kieron is not yet 13. The relationship between the two is explicit, and goes beyond the obvious facts (they are both working-class boys who love football, doubt their friends and defend an ...”

“... that the film was Cries and Whispers, and she was dying of cancer. Actors recur. Here is Maggie Smith, youthful and copper-haired in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and here she is again, wrinkled and aged – the film may be Keeping Mum (2005) – not by make-up but by time itself. Other actors come and go, flashing past in their youth, their ...”

“... The Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, Blue Velvet … and now Poor Things, which has stirred delight and contempt, and proved that cinema can still put us in a ferment. Can you imagine an Oppenheimer that produced such mixed feelings? Yet the full story of the Bomb would be an ...”

“... Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. Orwell discounts Jack the Ripper as an altogether special artisan of murder, but of the remaining eight, six were poisoners. The perfect murderer, he explains, was one who would satisfy the requirements of the reader ...”

“... the point of explosion. Flora MacDonald was born exactly three hundred years ago and was 24 when Bonnie Prince Charlie lurched into her life. The new biography by Flora Fraser (who is named after her subject) intends to sift out a ‘real Flora’ from the spoil heap of sentimental legend. That means balancing the brief episode with the prince against the ...”

“... different results. The Pale King was found by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell: a chaos of paper, floppy disks, notebooks, three-ring-binders; words, some typed, some in his tiny handwriting, all adding up to hundreds of pages. There was no direction for its organisation, so they enlisted the help of Michael Pietsch, who ...”

“... it sees the deeper intellectual implications of Bishop’s disarmingly casual writing – is Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery). It is good to have both the Goldensohn ‘biography of the poetry’ and the Millier biography of the life, both of them likely to draw new attention to the poetry and prose. A Letters is in ...”

“... the publishers, then and later, rejected orchestral scores by some of the same women. Alice Mary Smith, nine years Claribel’s junior, was appointed Honorary Female Professional Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in the year of her death, 1884. She first attracted attention with a piano quartet at the London Musical Society, but was most famous for her ...”

“... and readers rarely couple the names of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson,’ Janet Adam Smith would write.In the houses where James’s novels are a long row in the study, most of the Stevensons are up in the nursery or in the schoolroom … Yet in their lifetime the two men were linked, not only by the closest ties of personal affection, but by a ...”

“... the Sacramento Bee announced in a recent headline. The thirst for vengeance, admitted Billy Smith, after watching the execution in Virginia by lethal injection of the man who had murdered his father in the course of robbing his jewellery store, had ‘ultimately evolved into a yearning for closure’. Waiting had been ‘almost like reading a novel and ...”