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“... This confirmed me as his creature.I knew my name came out of one of the blacked-out books – Lorna from Lorna Doone – and that he’d chosen it. Now he’d given me a special key to his world, it seemed. We were even closer allies afterwards, so that when he took me with him in the rattling Singer to Whitchurch, and ...”

“... These days Hanmer School is tranquil and thriving, just the kind of country school people campaign to keep open because it’s gentler than the bigger urban versions, and the kids get more individual attention. Astonishing, to me, to go back and eavesdrop on these well-behaved children who wear uniforms, talk trustingly with their teachers, and have even produced a booklet which tells me that the school was first built in 1676, and that the Charity Commissioners reported in 1847 that it was damp and dirty, with rotting furniture ...”

“... Hanmer’s pretty mere, the sloping fields that surrounded us, and the hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses that fringed the lanes, might as well have been a cunning mirage as far as grandma was concerned. They did nothing to alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters ...”

“... When I was fifteen and a half I received a letter from my new friend Lorna Stockton which announced that she was reading T.S. Eliot, ‘in a tree’. I stared at these words in alarm: who was this T.S. Eliot? Trees, for me, were climbing frames full of cunningly shaped, preferably fatal, challenges to ascent and had no relation to books ...”

“... New York Review of Books in April 1992, nine weeks after her death, and he is the wicked uncle of Lorna Sage’s collection of critical essays, Flesh and the Mirror. Hermione Lee, in an intelligent and warm-hearted defence of Carter, calls Bayley’s essay ‘a striking exercise in insidious disparagement’; Elaine Jordan, in a less eloquent ...”

“... young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are ...”

“... better in one of Vita’s bestselling novels than in Violet’s own fiction, written in what Lorna Sage called her ‘sardonically lightweight, accomplished and comic’ style. In her memoirs, published in 1952, Violet presented Vita as an uncompromisingly English figure: gauche, perpendicular, stolid, unsuitably dressed in her mother’s old ...”

“... when Carter was alive and well. One of her ‘most impressive and humorous achievements’, Lorna Sage, her friend and cleverest critic, once wrote, ‘was that she evolved this part to play: How to Be the Woman Writer. Not that she was wearing a mask exactly: it was more a matter of refusing to observe any decorous distinction between art and ...”

“... She​ was famous for being neglected,’ Lorna Sage once said of Christina Stead. In 1955, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New Republic, described trying to obtain Stead’s address from her last American publisher. Only a few years before the New Yorker had called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf ...”