"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"

[fiefoe]

The gentle Scottish burr used by Nadia May in the audiobook is pleasant to listen to, but Muriel Spark broadcasts the eventual betrayal ahead so persistently that it's hard to relax into the story.

• The speciality of the feast was pineapple cubes with cream, and the specialty of the day was that they were left to themselves. To Sandy the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness.
• Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored.
• It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair.
• Miss Lockhart who seemed to carry six inches of pure air around her wherever she moved in that strange-smelling room.
• And it was not a static Miss Brodie who told her girls, "These are the years of my prime."
• Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide," said Miss Brodie. "Six inches is perfectly adequate. MOre is vulgar. One should have an innate sense of these things."
• They were not, however, committee women. They were not school-teachers. The committee spinsters were less enterprising and not at all rebellious..
• These events contained enough exciting possibilities to set the rest of the Easter holidays spinning like a top and to last out the whole of the summer term. {It really didn't take that much.}
• Rose Stanley sliced a worm down the middle with the greatest absorption during her first term's biology,although in two terms' time she shuddered at the thought and had dropped the subject.
• she could look back and recognise that Miss Brodie's defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects;
• She looked quite beautiful and frail, and it occurred to Sandy that she had possibly renounced Teddy Lloyd only because she was aware that she could not keep up this beauty; it was a quality in her that came and went.