Even a bizarre bankruptcy is a bankruptcy is a bankruptcy, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, for my intellectual readers.

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Lord Berners had a celebrity circle of friends including Salvador Dali, Siegfried Sassoon, HG Wells, Gertrude Stein and John Betjeman.

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Or, as Gertrude Stein might have said, exciting and peaceful.

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You can also see the mark of abstraction on a fair amount of 20th-century literature and not just the avowedly experimental writings of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, either.

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She teases the reader intellectually rather in the way that Gertrude Stein used to tease, by a strange use of repetition, and by often using silliness as a route to the exploration of seriousness.

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Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso and Man Rey and gets his novel critiqued by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway a dream come true for someone who idealizes Jazz Age Paris as a golden age for creativity.

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It was Gertrude Stein.

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The idea of hospitality provides a link, often quite tenuous, between a series of entertaining historical anecdotes, as Mr Browner ranges broadly from Petronius to Adolf Hitler via the court of Louis XIV, the log cabin of John James Audubon and the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein.

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