Word: flanner
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...course gaffe of cutting the tips off Brie and Camembert wedges; instead try the fragrant Cantal, "like soft Cheddar, with a hint of athlete's foot." As a prose stylist, Clarke can't hold a cheese knife to legions of past Anglo-Saxon observers like Mark Twain and Janet Flanner (or even to Mayle). But Merde has a lively plot - West's French boss is up to no good - plus an element missing in many such tomes: sex. The hero's success in learning to separate politesse from a French woman's true intentions is instructive, as are his graphic...
Many of those peers had a high opinion of Mary. Janet Flanner ("Genet") called her "the most educated female mind of our time in both America and England." The New Yorker editor William Shawn went so far as to say, "There aren't many people you could mention in connection with Samuel Johnson. But you could mention Mary McCarthy." That's going too far. McCarthy left some good travel writing, interesting memoirs and some biting stories. Her best sustained work was her personality--forceful, witty, sometimes generous, often merciless...
Sometimes, as in the case of Janet Flanner, this urge to self-censorship makes for a rather opaque style of revelation. Writing for a half-century under the pen-name of "Genet" for The New Yorker, Flanner generally focused her discriminating eye upon the social and artistic elite of Europe. Her work often recalls the advocacy for taste and manners so prominent in the pioneering efforts of Addison and Steele; at other times, Flanner inserts herself neatly into the turmoil of the age, observing a bankrupt Berlin of 1931 or reflecting upon the fate of Warsaw some time after...
...America's foremost contemporary reporter-turned-essayist, Joan Didion. When Didion undertakes a character profile -- her piece on James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, for example -- she doesn't begin with the subject, his family, philosophy, or even a recitation of his favorite food (as did Janet Flanner in a 1936 profile of Adolph Hitler). Rather, Didion begins the piece with a word about her own recollection of Pike's church, and then characteristically proceeds to lace the narrative with what she calls elsewhere, "always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I.'" "The greatest study of Mann is Mann" wrote Janet...
...Paris Was Yesterday 1925-1939, Flanner...