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“... diffident intellectual became a novelist, the practical man of the world a philosopher. Henry, as Rebecca West observed, wrote fiction as though it were philosophy and William wrote philosophy as though it were fiction. Their sister, Alice, was an equally remarkable writer, but she was riven by psychosomatic disorders – another Jamesian characteristic ...”

“... is fair-minded enough to surround her with women who really did make their careers on their own: Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, Natalie Barney and Zelda’s Montgomery classmate and friend Sara Haardt, who fled belle-dom to write fiction; the serious and tubercular Sara eventually married H.L. Mencken and died shortly afterwards. These women were more or ...”

“... not have been tolerated in commercial travellers. Evelyn Waugh, in the company of ‘the tomboy Rebecca West’, is perhaps unaware that his Decline and Fall is a chained book in the lavatory. Poets of the day include Gerald Gould, who in a forgotten sonnet urged his contemporaries ‘For God’s sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it.’ Humbert Wolfe ...”

“... mourn for the loss of a dead comrade … but we also rejoice in her splendid heroism.’ Rebecca West joined in the tributes: ‘To the end sunlight was on her face. I was glad that for an executioner she had an unmalicious brute.’ Whether she wanted to sacrifice herself isn’t clear – the circumstances of her death are waiting for their ...”

“... has also taken the trouble to visit many of the places she discusses – in Britain, Japan, West Germany and the United States – and her comparative approach often clarifies what is distinctive about the peace movement in particular national cultures: millenarian tendencies in America, for instance, or anti-Nazi complications in Germany. Hiroshima’s ...”

“... a best-seller, instead of an academic “doubtsell”.’ In this he was disappointed, but Dame Rebecca West allowed him to see a letter from G.B. Stern, recalling how May Sinclair had told them, in her ‘neat, precise little voice’, that Charlotte Mew had chased her upstairs into her bedroom, ‘and I assure you, Peter, and I assure you, ...”

“... eyes. ‘Once every hundred years.’ In a review of ‘The Garden Party’ and Other Stories, Rebecca West wrote that Mansfield’s ‘inventions’, as she oddly called them, had ‘lived so long in her mind that she knows all about them and can ransack them for the difficult, rare, essential points’. What Mansfield had learned how to ransack was ...”

“... heart of Victorian family and social life. When Flush was published in 1933, feminist reviewers (Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay among them) immediately drew parallels between the spaniel and Elizabeth Barrett, seeing his story as her psychological biography: she is petted and confined like him, always subject to the will of others. Flush marks the ...”

“... Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca West). The manuscript’s progress through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this ...”

“... to think that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family might be embarrassed by his ...”

“... and Tide, her journalism published everywhere, exciting new friendships with Margaret Rhondda, Rebecca West, E.M. Delafield, Stella Benson and Storm Jameson and all the other attributes that Phyllis Bentley had found so desirable, including Bentley herself. Active, outspoken, energetic, her tall figure slightly stooped but her glance just as ...”

“... one strand. Along the way, Harriet Weaver, a socialist feminist, became the editor, assisted by Rebecca West, who told Marsden: ‘I don’t see why a movement towards freedom of expression in literature should not be associated with your gospel. Tell me, did you ever try to get any short stories or literary essays?’ Soon afterwards, ...”

“... kind of left-wing ideology, from anarchism to syndicalism; others turned against Europe and the West in a search for an as yet undiscovered foundation for a new global order, less tainted by the recent bloodletting masquerading as ‘civilisation’. After 1919, many right-leaning Japanese and Chinese intellectuals and politicians adopted a Japanese-led ...”

“... only three days, he escaped from a lawyer’s office in New Brunswick at the age of 17 and headed west to Calgary, where he ran a bowling alley. There, in Williams’s words, he learned ‘knowledge of how a grandee looked and behaved, and more to the immediate point, of the advantages of insider information as a sure way of making money’. Soon he was ...”

“... when we arrived in Cairo in 1947 looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the west. I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian and ...”