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“... than in works of art? Unfortunately, the reprint silently omits his Preface and though Penelope Fitzgerald’s Introduction includes some useful biographical facts it cannot balance the loss. Of the major characters, Rajah Amar is gradually and unexpectedly moved into the centre of the action. Buddhist self-discipline has brought him to the ...”

“... highly profitable. Freddie’s is the Temple Stage School, off Covent Garden, and Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel is also set in the 1960s. It is therefore conceivable that the two worlds of Sour Sweet and At Freddie’s could have existed, in some factual-fictional London, nestling hermetically, worlds apart, within a hundred yards of each ...”

“... is an uninspired contribution from Katherine Bucknell. Wendy Lesser remarks on what she sees as Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncanny ability to re-create alien cultures. In his deceptively off-the-cuff critical style, Michael Wood writes sensitively of Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, pointing out that for Rushdie there’s no place like home in a rather more ...”

“... of English writers, mostly women – Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor and Rumer Godden and Penelope Fitzgerald among them – whose subject is the old world of class and empire, and the systems of education and intricate cultural codes that supported it. Sharing that world’s know-how, vigilant over its precise local expertise, these writers ...”

“... plied gyno-confusion of the vadge’, though as a touchstone for elegant prose he mentions Penelope Fitzgerald. He’s also keen for us to know that he often stops ‘to shake my yokel’ while typing out his memoirs – a practice that, as the pages pile up, gives him a nasty case of carpal tunnel syndrome, leading to a wholly gratuitous and very ...”

“... and taste for bittersweet mysticism, other names suggest themselves here too: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Fay Weldon.) She slowly assumed the status of national treasure, despite or maybe precisely because of the cannily maintained, resonantly low profile. There are forms of politesse and prevarication that can slot very well ...”

“... I’m not sure what the book can reasonably be likened to – a mad mixture of Thomas Pynchon and Penelope Fitzgerald? – and I’m not sure that I’d recommend it over Red Plenty to someone havering between the two. But there’s no question that Spufford has extended his activities into an only very slightly more conventional ...”

“... a watch repairer. On page five, Arno compares some office dictation slightingly with the prose of Penelope Fitzgerald. Even in Britain, this reference would be one of self-advertising sophistication: towed across the Atlantic, it moves up several orders of pretension-magnitude. Arno is able, with different gadgets and rituals at different times of his ...”

“... Moffat, Nicola Beauman and Francis King.) As such, it joins distinguished portraits of Novalis (Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower), Dostoevsky (Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most ...”

“... protagonist is, as Carter emphasises, ‘a big girl’. Her misjudged but reiterated contempt for Penelope Fitzgerald, who won the Booker Prize in 1979, was perhaps of a piece with her feeling that these were not the times for gentleness or understatement. Carter was, of course, a feminist writer, but as the binary oppositions of a decade characterised ...”

“... do with words. Depends, I suppose, who you do it with.She spent a few days dipping into novels – Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, William Trevor, Tim Parks among others – to limber up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and having extracted the technical nuts and bolts (beginning, middle, end; main and subsidiary plot and ...”

“... The wits. I would put her alongside Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, Charlotte Mew and Penelope Fitzgerald. All unflinching, elliptical, self-disguising. King quotes well from a terrific essay in which Bainbridge describes the surprise she got when she attended her brother’s funeral. She hadn’t realised he had been a coroner. So: they ...”

“... surprising for she was not, in any usual sense, a good letter writer. Unlike Elizabeth Bowen or Penelope Fitzgerald, with both of whom she might be compared as a novelist, there is no sense of her trying out obviously literary ideas. There is scant detail in description, little incident and the few character sketches are laconic. Léonie Marsh, a ...”

“... seems itself antiquarian, as if Woolf and Proust and Chekhov, not to mention Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, had never existed. Byatt’s formidable research commands respect, but it is hard fully to respect a novel in which Rodin, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Marie Stopes have walk-on parts, or that delivers itself of lines like: ‘All sorts ...”

“... able to name the figure that inspired it? Sixty years after Punch ran the poem, Knox’s daughter, Penelope Fitzgerald, published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been ...”