Elizabeth Taylor the novelist may well have been overlooked as the brilliant writer she is because she shares a name with with a film actress. Mrs Palfrey at the Clairmont, the novel I am currently reading, rather short and I linger over every phrase because I do not want to come to the end of it. It describes the elderly inhabitants of a residential hotel in Kensington. Her observation of detail makes me laugh out loud almost on every page. Today I read for example: "Mrs Post put her small hair combings out of the window - London birds she had read were short of nest building materials."
What a relief to find that electronic items are at last becoming wire -less.!Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to compute.Behind every desk and table it seems is a spaghetti junction.
Wireless is a lovely word and the quicker it takes over the better.
2 comments:
Delightful photo.
The book sounds very interesting. Will look for it.
Very much a tangled web. I've been unable to access your blog for about 36 hr, triggering only error messages and blank spaces. I notice that my operating address has changed since I crossed the Channel: blogspot becomes blogspot.fr so no doubt that's at the heart of my problems.
I brought an Elizabeth Taylor with me on holiday (title forgotten and it's in the room where VR is sleeping) but I've hardly read a word of anything other than my gluttonous consumption of L'Equipe. It's not so much that I'm obsessed with sport, rather sport treated and described in French. Let's see if I can find an example of the sort of thing that charms me. Straightaway, on the front page, a strapline: A Londres pour diputer le tournoi du Queen's Jo-Wilfried Tsonga décortique sa défaite (à) Roland-Garros. "Disputeer" is a good start, du rather than de la is a good technical grammatical point, but best of all is décortique. Those wonderful five-dollar words.
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