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“... best book to date is Difficult Women, an unflattering account of his friendship with Sonia Orwell, Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer. He won’t be winning first prize for dignity, but he tells it pretty much like it was – and like he was, you imagine. But discretion is never his first instinct. As for Stephen himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to ...”

“... seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or conspiracy to semi-oblivion – the novelist Valéry Larbaud, ‘the poet of first-class travel’, and the Russian short story writer Ivan Bunin. Bunin could evoke the transient but potent ...”

“... this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content ...”

“... Outpost of Progress’. I read that story as part of my apprenticeship. Later he saw that Jean Rhys had had a clear vision of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea and other works, and she became one of the very few living novelists he recommended.But he also said that even bad writing was revealing – sometimes more revealing than skilful ...”

“... vehement in her dislike of slightly older women writers, such as Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and Jean Rhys, whom she claimed to find victim-like. Such women also, one can’t help but notice, had the fragile slightness her mother had but she didn’t, in their bodies and in their works. Even after giving birth herself, Ward Jouve noted, Carter never ...”

“... Small rituals fix a wandering identity. Stoic breakdown is Didion’s territory, as it was Jean Rhys’s, Colette’s and, now, Lydia Davis’s – connoisseurs of isolation and erotic obsession. Rhys’s heroines suffer because of accidents and psychological peculiarities (unlucky throws of the dice), while ...”

“... were written by the great French composer Georges Auric, a member with Poulenc and Tailleferre of Jean Cocteau’s Les Six. The Lavender Hill Mob is often seen as a gentle caper comedy, but wrapped up inside this genre piece is a powerful fantasy of escape. Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness, the film’s partners in crime, are at heart romantics and dreamers ...”

“... period.Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless NightsOh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.Jean Rhys, QuartetThe​ image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is ...”