Quotes from Elizabeth Kostova's books, and about them
The Historian on Dracula: ““Dracula, by Bram Stoker.” “Just a minute, please; I’ll see if it’s in.” She thumbed through a little box, her face expressionless.”
The Historian on Great Expectations: “My father came home early for dinner that night and read aloud to me from Great Expectations.”
The Historian on Much Ado about Nothing: “‘Yes, very old.’ He handed me a nineteenth-century edition of Much Ado About Nothing—cheap looking, bound in worn cloth.”
The Historian on The Prince: “It turned out to be an early edition of Machiavelli: The Prince, accompanied by a series of discourses on morality I’d never before seen or even heard of.”
The Historian on The Portrait of a Lady: “she stepped in automatically when I encountered Madame Merle, the personable schemer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.”
The Historian on The Rape of the Lock: ““Dear me,” Hedges murmured. “Pope and the alliterative. Sweet nymph. For argument.” ... “‘The Rape of the Lock,’” Hedges said politely. “Without a doubt.””
The Historian on Mein Kampf: “There was a dog-eared first edition of Mein Kampf and a diary in French—handwritten, spotted here and there with brown mould.”
The Historian on Historia Turco-Byzantina: “It was a remarkable find, I thought then, although I know now what a basic source it is for fifteenth-century Byzantine history—a translation of Michael Doukas’s Istoria Turco-Bizantina.”