Word: harriet
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Blaise is pompous, and a bit of a charlatan. His personal life is grotesque as the novel begins and rapidly grows more so. His trustful, loving wife Harriet, by whom he has a teen-age son, at first knows nothing of foul-tempered Emily, his mistress of nine years, nor of Luca, Emily's eight-year-old son by Blaise. He swindles time to visit Emily by saying that he is visiting a difficult nocturnal patient named Magnus Bowles...
Magnus has taken on vivid reality for Harriet, though he is the invention of a skilled detective-story writer named Montague Small, who, to the extent that he is a friend of anything, is a friend of the family. Each week Small supplies Blaise with newly elaborated symptoms. Magnus has supposed himself, for instance, to be a large egg and, during another crisis, has imagined that he is stalked by a wooden-legged bishop...
...psychological theorizing is mostly cant, yet he does have a knack for helping his patients. His visits to sharp-tongued Emily's apartment are mixed blessings-it is a hate nest in which the girl spends a good deal of time demanding money to have her teeth fixed. Harriet at first seems too kind and innocent to live. But her unreflective goodness amounts almost to genius. When Blaise's second family comes to light and he begins to dash about with one foot in the trap of matrimony and the other in the bucket of illicit love, Harriet...
...Andelot Belin, Radcliffe's lawyer and the husband of Harriet Belin, a former Radcliffe dean of admissions...
...short, a conservative Mill dwelt within the liberal Mill, and in fact tended to dominate everywhere but in On Liberty. Here, Himmelfarb insists that Mill, under the goading of the formidable Harriet, became more radical than he realized or wanted to be. In extending the common piety about freedom of speech to freedom of action, he committed an act of intellectual subversion for which the 20th century has paid with the impossible drunken dream of total freedom. Lord Acton's dictum -power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely-we have learned all too well. It is time...