Eurgh. I’m not convinced I’d enjoy such a book — these people are not my people. I much prefer the Victorians, swanning about being verbosely dramatic about everything. I don’t like any of the Stein/Hemingway set, except Fitzgerald I guess, if he counts? And even he is not my favoritest fellow in all the land. I haven’t seen Midnight in Paris but I heard it’s wonderful!

Hahahahaha. I didn’t know pot brownies had been around for so long! I’ve always thought of them as a newish invention, although now that I’m thinking about that, I don’t know why I would have such an assumption.

Yessssssssss. My childhood dreams are coming true.

I DO NOT KNOW WHY. I do not even know. I was just reading a book about literary estates and whenever they talked about destroying papers and letters, my heart felt so very very sad. Those crazy damn lunatics.

You can definitely read this without having read anything by Gertrude Stein. Apart from the excerpts contained in this book, I have still not read a single syllable of Gertrude Stein and based on the excerpts contained in this book that is a sound policy on my part.

Oh, yes, Malcolm quotes that bit from Hemingway. Gertrude Stein sounds like…someone I would not want to be friends with. You know, very charming, it sounds like? But I got the strong impression from the Malcolm book that she wasn’t good at keeping her friends. She sounds very, very, very selfish.

There are books like that about more people than you’d think! (And The Bronte Myth is on my list.) Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes was really superb, one of my favorite books of its year, and there is one about Jane Austen too, I think. Oscar Wilde’s grandson has a book in the works about the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials, which I’m hoping deals at least somewhat with this aspect of the history.

Have you seen ‘Midnight in Paris’? Kathy Bates’ plays Stein – the characterisation was pretty positive, I thought. The depiction of Hemingway is hilarious.