Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Hannah writes sentences like these, from the story "Love Too Long": "She and the architect were having fancy drinks together at a beach lounge when his ex-wife from New Hampshire showed up naked with a single-shotgun that was used in the Franco-Prussian War - it was a quaint piece hanging on the wall in their house when he was at Dartmouth - and screaming." (A. Martin, Gonzo Guys, TLS April 15, 2011, p.20) | Bedford spent her early years with her father in a schloss near Baden, full of Renaissance art. He had lost all his money, and they lived in austere seclusion, bartering their apples for butter and using candles for light, but he liked to sketch and was fond of animals, having kept a chimpanzee in his youth. The ill-tempered family donkey was given felt slippers to wear when it came into the house. (C. Moorehead, The warm south, Ibid, p.14) | New Yorker editing is easily caricatured. The obsession with coordinate syntax and commas, the fact checking, the distaste for certain topics and products [...] and the cultivation of a particular breed of ironic detachment [...] (F. Green, Occupation: Writer, Ibid, p.3) | The notion of devoting an entire conference, and then a book, to a single painted pot is one that would only occur to Classicists [...] (AM Snodgrass, A piper at the party, TLS May 13 2011, p.4) | "The only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense." Edward Gibbons victim in that particular footnote was Jerome, the author of three extremely imaginative "Lives" of hermits. (WV Harris, Time of bones, Ibid, p.5) | A few years ago, during a visit to Yalta, the director of the Chekhov museum there swore to me that Chekhov's toothbrush had disappeared from the display after a visit by a group of Japanese tourists. [...] In Yalta, Putin had paid an obligatory visit to the Chekhov museum and the director had jokingly urged the Prime Minister not to return the Kuril Islands to the Japanese unless they returned Chekhov's toothbrush to the museum in Yalta (Z Zinik, Freelance, Ibid, p.16)