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“... their importance). There were striking exceptions – notably the effervescent presence of Rebecca West as a regular reviewer. But there were also some obvious disasters at the literary end: the all too aptly named Hubert Bland, the incompetent Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David ...”

“... Eleanor Marx, Edith Ellis, Amber Reeves, even such obviously successful women as Beatrice Webb and Rebecca West – none of them managed to live their lives as they would have done had they been entirely free agents. And if it is argued that none of us are free agents, then one need only compare their lives with those of the men they were involved ...”

“... others pointed to the masterful structure, key to the terrifying suspense he created; some, like Rebecca West, who called it a ‘grave and reverent book’, applauded Capote’s compassion. In Cold Blood deserves all the praise it received two decades ago; its power has not diminished. Clarke tells the extraordinary, improbable story of how the book ...”

“... many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and admired. ‘What a pathetic ...”

“... a pointless and omni-directed superciliousness so relentlessly predictable that if, for example, Rebecca West is cited making a perfectly tenable statement you can rely on being told that she was displaying ‘qualities that must have once made H.G. Wells wonder what he had gotten into’. There is in this book too much snide misrepresentation and sheer ...”

“... strictures. Martha Gellhorn wrote about Dachau, Mavis Tate about Buchenwald. Laura Knight and Rebecca West covered the Nuremberg trials as Fleur Cowles had covered the Nuremberg rally eight years previously. But the women who described themselves, persistently and irritatingly, as ordinary, unimportant, even simple, did tend to write as though they ...”

“... provided. Contempt for housework shaded easily into contempt for those who did it. The young Rebecca West, writing in the Freewoman, the most daring of the suffrage publications, thought that housework was only ‘suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits’. Very few in the suffrage movement or in the trade unions suggested that men take ...”

“... contention that Wells could simultaneously and honestly love his wife and his young mistress Rebecca West (as well as any number of other young mistresses) is more palatable than Coren’s moralistic posturings about infidelity. And there are also things which Michael Foot chooses not to know. He wholly ignores, for instance, the Hedwig Grattingen ...”

“... to Lord Haw-Haw. The British public accepted this as part of its freedom to listen. In 1945, when Rebecca West reported the trials of the British traitors for the New Yorker, she found to her surprise that the public had little hatred for men like Joyce and could not see why their punishment had to be so severe. Joyce’s trial and appeal lasted three ...”

“... to confront the often hostile representation of men in the works of such writers as Richardson, Rebecca West, Alexandra Kollontai, Christina Stead, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Miller’s deliberately unsystematic readings have an impressive cumulative power. By the end of the book, as she discusses the work of black and ...”

“... out, on a salver, sentence after sentence’. Her criticisms of prominent women writers such as Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen and Woolf appear to be coloured by jealousy, while her praise of lesser-known women writers, such as Ruth Suckow and E.B.C. Jones, seems extravagant. It is something of a shock to discover that the prototype of the pessimistic ...”

“... eulogised as feminist foremothers: Margaret Mead and her fellow anthropologists of the 1920s, Rebecca West and the pioneers of British ‘New Feminism’, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt (the last two, both openly hostile to feminism, qualify on the grounds that as ‘trouble-makers and rule-breakers’ they lived the feminism they ...”

“... to be said that it is an unsatisfactory, even a morally dubious genre. It is a genre in which Dame Rebecca West had earlier made a faultless showing with her account of the case of Mr Setty and Mr Hume. In immaculate and stately prose, and with a Dickensian relish for geographical detail and for common speech, Dame ...”

“... might have done after 1912 – but on a glorious defeat, with all its connotations of vengeance. Rebecca West noticed this habit of clinging to victimhood in her Serbian guide, Constantine, in the late Thirties: It was as if he were a very sick man, for he was sleepy, fretful, inferior to himself, and quarrelsome. He could put nothing in a way that was ...”

“... with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one recalls how affectionately she brought her father back in The fountain overflows, one concludes that Barker is her Blakean partner, the tank that contains. She wants to write an autobiography, but is unwilling to give anything away. As ...”