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“... These books are all witness to a hope as old as the Garden of Eden, the hope of a perfect partnership. The full-length biography of Carrington and the edited correspondence of Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova (from 1918 to their marriage in 1925, more volumes to follow) also suggest that there is still a good deal of reading to be done about Bloomsbury ...”

“... Mary Kingsley, the traveller – not the explorer, she said, because there wasn’t anywhere she went in West Africa where Africans hadn’t been before her – was and is described as a splendid woman. I don’t know at what point the word ‘splendid’ acquired its present shade of meaning and became something that a woman would rather not be called ...”

“... During her lifetime Charlotte Mew was either greatly liked or greatly disliked, and now, more than fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are at least two collections of her papers which nobody is given permission to see – not quite with the feeling that she ought to be left to rest in peace, but, rather, that she shouldn’t be shared indiscriminately with outsiders ...”

“... of the set was written for an anthology of ghost stories, a genre that had an obvious appeal. Fitzgerald’s Cambridge novel, The Gate of Angels, contains a character closely resembling M.R. James, and ‘The Axe’ is a skilfully composed horror story he would have enjoyed. But it is far from derivative, with much more going on in it than one would at ...”

“... Penelope Fitzgerald has always seemed a quintessentially English novelist, low-key, exquisitely perceptive, and with a notable feeling for place – the seedy houseboats on the Thames in Offshore, or the mean little Suffolk town that dominates The Bookshop. Her latest novel, The Beginning of Spring, is a surprise, and something of a tour de force ...”

“... were not foreign to her life, and Charlotte Mew has come to be cherished as ‘neglected’. Penelope Fitzgerald makes it clear that she doesn’t think this means Mew has to be considered a genius, and that the disregard she has suffered was not due to lack of support in her lifetime. She has written a good book about her: one which is ...”

“... Nobody expected Penelope Fitzgerald to win the Booker Prize in 1979 for her novel Offshore. Keneally was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face ...”

“... In 1997, three years before her death, Penelope Fitzgerald asked her American publisher, Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died ...”

“... books of Beryl Bainbridge, who has been shortlisted but has not won. A more recent candidate is Penelope Fitzgerald, whose first straight novel The Bookshop won no prize, and whose second, Offshore, is shortlisted this year. If it wins, I shall need to revise my views on the whole matter; my guess is that it is on the list only to be eliminated at the ...”

“... five years ago, won praise from critics who know what they’re talking about – for example, Penelope Fitzgerald, writing in the LRB. It was a book that showed an easy technical control, an ability to do the things novelists have to do, and in so young a writer these skills were reasonably thought to presage later and more ambitious ...”

“... Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is a historical novel based on the life of the poet, aphorist, novelist, Friedrich von Hardenberg, a Saxon nobleman who wrote under the name of Novalis and lived from 1772 to 1801. He figures largely in all accounts of the German literature of the time, and Georg Lukács is not much more extravagant than other critics in calling him the only Romantic poet ...”

“... Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence is set in Florence, the principal characters are Italian, and I kept asking myself: how is it done? She knows quite a lot about Italian society: but more important, she has somehow got inside her Italian characters, so that when a young Englishwoman appears on the scene she really seems a foreigner and not, as one might expect, the focus of the novel’s consciousness ...”

“... go at de Morgan since 1926, and there is clearly a case for fishing the novels out of oblivion.In Penelope Fitzgerald’s last novel, Offshore, the wide distribution of which may have had the fortuitous effect of sending up the price of de Morgan tiles, two rather forward little girls conspired to fish two out of Battersea Reach, when the tide was down ...”

“... Penelope Fitzgerald’s new novel, like her last one, The Beginning of Spring, is set just before the First World War. Its locale, 1912 Cambridge, is not much less exotic than its predecessor’s Moscow, but it is entirely convincing: Fitzgerald’s pre-1914 worlds are wonderfully circumstantial ...”

“... Watching a good plot,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in the LRB (21 February 1980),is like watching something alive, or if it is adroit and sinuous enough, something struggling for life. Between the once-born and the twice-born plot (which makes the reader, even if he is reading it for the twentieth time, want to interfere at every stage), the difference, of course, is great ...”