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“... Katherine Mansfield, unlucky in life, has been lucky in death. Where some figures sink under successive waves of literary fashion, she remains buoyant. One Mansfield vanishes but another takes its place. If you measure simply by the fictional product you might conclude she has had more than her fair share of attention. If you take, not the work, but the writer, then the attention seems entirely justified ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, Sylvia Ashton-Warner in 1908 and Janet Frame in 1924 – three New Zealand women each of whom has achieved some measure of literary fame or reputation outside the country in which she was born. They have in common that they have worked uneasily in (and always breaking out of) the fictional mode. The fictions of all three are forms of autobiography while autobiography tends towards fiction ...”

“... My grandmother, who was born about 1880, was proud of the fact that both her parents were born in New Zealand. It made her, she used to say, ‘a real Pig Islander’. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land ...”

“... Les Murray (b.1938) grew up on a dairy farm in northern New South Wales, an only child whose mother died of what seems to have been a medical misadventure when he was 12. The farmhouse was hardly more than a timber shell with an iron roof – there was no lining or ceiling, and conditions were primitive. He was a fat boy, and still quakes inwardly when he finds himself in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago ...”

“... Claire Clairmont was, briefly, Byron’s mistress, and the mother of his child Allegra. But was she also Shelley’s lover? Did she become pregnant by him? Did she give birth to his child? From the journals, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking and published in 1986, it seems clear that she was in love with Shelley at the age of 16. After the deaths of the two poets she never spoke well of Byron, nor ill of Shelley (though she rejected the ‘angelic’ myth ...”

“... The release in 2009 of the first two volumes of T.S. Eliot’s letters, and the year before of the final volume of Katherine Mansfield’s, raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and indeed with Eliot himself? Why were Vivien’s feelings about Murry so tortured – and was Mansfield jealous of her? There can be no doubt that Eliot was deeply suspicious of Mansfield, and there is plenty of evidence that she observed him closely and accurately ...”

“... is some reason to believe the author would encourage his readers to discover or invent them. C.K. Stead is a poet and an academic critic as well as a novelist. As a critic, he has written a lot about Modernism, and what he admires about the writers he thinks worthy of the appellation ‘Modernist’ – Ezra Pound above all – is a habit or quality of ...”

“... Recently in this journal C.K. Stead explained the dilemma of being a popular Australasian performer in England: ‘He can only be fully understood at home: but there he’s likely to encounter sullenness and resentment, which is overcome, paradoxically, by the irresistible force of a fame earned where the comprehension of what he is doing must be less than complete ...”

“... dark, cruel world which is and is not an allegorical representation of 20th-century Europe. C.K. Stead’s Sister Hollywood and Ronald Frame’s Penelope’s Hat both represent a certain mid-point between egotistical and self-annihilating narrative. Stead’s novel is written in two different voices: much the more ...”

“... isn’t that – but at least it is more a work of art than a disappearing act. The novels by C.K. Stead and Rudolf Nassauer, on the other hand, are distinctly shifty and slippery. The Death of the Body is an elegant contraption whose mainspring is double-time. Although we have been plentifully supplied for several decades now with novels the story of whose ...”

“... begin with ‘Let’s begin with the tea towel.’ Thus Professor Curl Skidmore, narrator of C.K. Stead’s All Visitors Ashore, announcing his presence in a text which proves something of a minor breakthrough in fictional technique. Towels, starting their lives as insignificant domestic signifiers, later waved at ships, soaked in blood, not waved, bleached ...”

“... was a shelf of New Zealand writers he encouraged or helped get into print: Frame, Lay, C.K. Stead, Dan Davin, Maurice Duggan, Kevin Ireland. ‘The Great Irrigation Scheme of New Zealand literature is having marvellous results,’ Frame wrote to him in 1978. ‘Remember the narrow channel you made, all alone, into that part of the land where everyone ...”

“... description. The consequences of all this can be very strange, as we see from C.K. Stead’s book. It is his second go at the subject, and comes 24 years after his first and much read book, The New Poetic. He wants to revise some of the opinions expressed there, especially concerning Yeats, whom he wants to move down, and Pound, whom he wants ...”

“... his magazine the Adelphi, he made several books out of her journals and letters. According to C.K. Stead, ‘Murry published something like 700,000 words of those papers he was instructed to tidy and leave fair.’ Professor Stead (who produced an unindexed edition of the letters and journals in 1977) and the other academics ...”

“... thought). In a big book I could find only two tiny slips: the Australian novelist Christina Stead is called ‘New Zealand-based’ (a confusion with the critic and novelist C.K. Stead), and the Nicolson of Weidenfeld and Nicolson receives a spurious ‘h’. The book attempts to fuse narrative and ...”