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“... Rose Macaulay loved semantics and her most precious possession was her 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary: ‘my bible, my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure,’ she wrote to Victor and Ruth Gollancz in a rare display of feeling, after they had replaced the copy destroyed with the rest of Macaulay’s flat during the Blitz ...”

“... A batch of seven letters caused this book to be written: six love-letters and one letter home from a brother in the Army. They are the only remaining personal papers of a French-woman called Célestine Chaumette, and Gillian Tindall found them in an otherwise almost empty house in the village of Chassignolles in Central France, where she and her family have had a summer home for more than twenty years ...”

“... Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a year later was writing in these sophisticated terms of his own literary strengths and weaknesses: I am certain that my mind is made if anything for self-contained imaginative work: critical activity of any kind is alien to me, alien and dissonant ...”

“... In the Tate Gallery St Ives exhibition catalogue for 1995 there is a comical photograph of the painter Bryan Wynter and some friends at Zennor in themid-1950s. They are seated round a bottle-strewn table. Wynter is smiling absently, Karl Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness ...”

“... and relaxed into a lifelong partnership, explaining: ‘I lean more and more on her trousers.’ Claire Harman has written a bright and freshly-expressed biography, which is full of interesting data. Characteristically, she excavates the facts of Warner’s early life, but does not labour their sapphic significance. Nor did Sylvia Townsend Warner. When ...”

“... is sad that she should have died such a short time before the publication of her Collected Poems. Claire Harman begins with the unpublished and uncollected work, arranged as far as possible in chronological order. STW is shown as an endless reviser, hard to satisfy. The Espalier (1925) and Time Importuned (1928), with their demurely ironic titles, are ...”

“... who was for years her editor at the New Yorker, published a selection of her letters in 1982, and Claire Harman, having edited the Collected Poems in 1983, published a good biography in 1989. Wendy Mulford’s lively study, This Narrow Place, gives a fuller account of the political activities of the Thirties, when Ackland and Warner joined the Communist ...”

“... of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties . . . in the best-chosen language’. Claire Harman’s book is subtitled ‘How Jane Austen Conquered the World’, so it is, in a sense, an attempt to settle such questions. The publication of her book has been the occasion of a dispute concerning the extent of her debt to Kathryn ...”

“... into being an adventurer by the weakness of his constitution, but one of the efficiencies of Claire Harman’s biography lies in the ease with which she shows his propensity for valedictory thinking. He was truly homeless, and in Fanny Osbourne he married another homeless person. Together they were a showcase of aches and pains, and their ...”

“... quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some facts are incontrovertible. The Beauchamps had five children who survived infancy; Kathleen was in the middle. Her ...”

“... Charlotte. They join several other biographies on the library shelf. It is worth asking – as Harman and Chisholm, for all their virtues, do not – what Burney was doing composing, storing (and later editing) these supposedly confidential documents. They have almost none of the compacted obscurity of, say, Jane Austen’s letters, which had no thought of ...”

“... of everything else).The most significant book published to mark Charlotte’s 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës ...”

“... approval he required. ‘He often classified [Fanny] as “other”,’ Stevenson’s biographer Claire Harman writes, ‘indeed, that was the essence of her attraction for him – addressing her jokily in letters (“Dear weird woman”, “My dear fellow”, “Dear Dutchwoman”) and describing her as “the foreign specimen” in Sargent’s ...”

“... spindly echelon. It was during a visit to the Essex marshland that she became, as her biographer Claire Harman puts it, ‘properly her own person’. For the first time in her life, she was later to recall, she felt ‘socketed into the universe and passionately quiescent’. As far as I’m aware, nobody ever had the temerity to describe Warner as ...”