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“... I’, declares a mysterious character in one of the short sketches that makes up this collection of fugitive pieces, ‘am a Traveller in Romance.’ It does not seem an apt title for Somerset Maugham, for apart from a passing whim to end his days at Angkor Wat, he strikes one as very little tinged with romance. He describes himself as ‘more inclined to look forward than to look back’, as having ‘always lived so much in the future’, and there was nothing romantic in the way he went about his writing ...”

“... her own, as in everyone else’s, eyes she was a bas bleu. Like her elder sisters in Sensibility, Elizabeth Carter, or the Ladies of Llangollen, whom she greatly admired, she sought with her self-education to adhere to a ‘system’ or working timetable. Had she not read The Proper Employment of Time, Talents and Fortune by the Llangollen Ladies’ friend ...”

“... As readers of her book on The Ladies of Llangollen will know, Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention. Now she has found a new clutch of them in the Archives of the Royal Irish Academy: an Irish countess, a Russian princess, a young woman from Co ...”