Search Results

“... In 1972 I started work on a study of Denys Finch Hatton and his relationship with Karen Blixen. The biographer’s nightmare is the knowledge that an important collection of papers pertaining to his subject is being withheld from him during research. When his subject is the more elusive half of a pair of lovers, the question immediately arises as to whether there can be a biography at all ...”

“... have been moved to tears by the 1985 motion picture which takes its title from the Baroness Blixen’s 1937 memoir, Out of Africa. These suckers will be taken aback if they ever come to read the old book on which they wrongly suppose it to be ‘based’. The memoir has been reissued by Penguin Books, with movie advertisements on the cover, and so have ...”

“... this tale is strengthened by the appearance of real-life people, not too well-known, and likewise Karen Blixen (to whom the book is dedicated) makes a personal appearance in the final story, ‘To die in Copenhagen’. The narrator of the tales is Howard Murray, a Scottish playwright, who travels to Denmark, as well as Dublin, London and New York in the ...”

“... of fantasy and décor make her a private and anomalous figure – as completely unmodern as, say, Karen Blixen. But a feminist critique might be fruitful. ‘Nora robbed herself for everyone; incapable of giving herself warning, she was continually turning about to find herself diminished. Wandering people the world over found her profitable in that she ...”

“... Club in Nairobi, where they gathered for special occasions; Torr’s Hotel and the Norfolk; Karen, the suburb of Nairobi named after Karen Blixen, on the outskirts of which, in January 1941, Erroll was shot dead. ‘All the flagrant, forgotten scandals of the Muthaiga ...”

“... whole, thrive better in hotter, lower, wetter places.’ The still more seductive witterings of Karen Blixen get even shorter shrift. Out of Africa’s idealisation of well-pedigreed white settlers was the work of a ‘fabulist’ struggling to identify herself with aristocratic values. It was dismaying, when I revisited Nairobi after many years, to ...”

“... Politics Ngugi is scathing about the narrowness of such well-known writers as Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen whom he places in ‘the tradition of great racists like Hume, Trollope, Hegel and Trevor-Roper, all arch-priests of privilege, racism and class snobbery’. It is the violence of such sentiments that has caused some people to see Ngugi himself ...”

“... writers: Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Wilde, Nietzsche, Joyce, Karen Blixen, van Gogh. Hayden reminds us, too, that politicians – Hitler, Abraham Lincoln and his wife – can, like anyone else, catch sexually transmitted diseases. Her approach is profitable and her choice of sufferers sensible: many of them left ...”

“... am dead,’ a court concluded that he had brought his fate on himself. In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen seemed to agree that his last words were an invocation, not a description. To her mind, he typified ‘the fugitiveness of the wild things who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence, who go when they like; of whom ...”

“... film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up ...”