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“... In a sense, the shadowiness of other people is appropriate, for the book’s only character is Elizabeth Smart, a woman absorbed in her own emotions and in love with the idea of being in love. The unnamed ghosts who cause her so much agony are simply men and women who are doing her wrong. Such blazing egotism might have generated a quickly-written ...”

“... Elizabeth Smart was browsing one day between the wars in the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social hopes, Smart came to lean against those London bookshelves as if they alone contained all the answers ...”

“... states unchanged; the tormented flesh and the singing head remain separate, even in coincidence. Elizabeth Smart was born in Ottawa in 1913. She was in London before the Second World War and read, in a bookshop, some of George Barker’s poems. She fell for him in print. This was a visitation of love as the ancients knew about it, a sudden incurable and ...”

“... times since it first appeared in the war a number of people have been riveted in this way by Elizabeth Smart’s one-off nouvelle. When the manuscript was accepted in 1941 she had wanted to call it Images of Mica, but George Barker, whom it was all about, flipped the typed pages at random and found a sentence beginning: ‘By Grand Central Station I ...”

“... fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation ...”

“... writing. Having read ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, Browning declares in his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett: ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too.’ Those rare, and usually misbegotten, occasions when the reader and writer approach each other directly are what interest Frances Wilson. Not the intriguing ...”

“... just as a broken control knob can evoke what is wrong with the world. In a bristling essay on Elizabeth Smart for the Dublin-based literary magazine Gorse, Bennett expressed a dislike of ‘accomplished’ writing: ‘I have a fancy for a rather more dappled conflation of vagueness and exactitude, flippancy and earnestness, aplomb and ...”

“... of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more sense if you see it as an attempt on Weldon’s part to ...”

“... of the habitués were loners, fighting for life, or fighting against it. ‘It wasn’t done,’ Elizabeth Smart said, ‘to go on too much about members’ suicides – not gloomily, anyhow. It spoiled the moment.’Droll jokes were the signature style, and Muriel must have been pretty good, because everybody, not least the barmen, spoke exactly like ...”

“... and his songs are glittering with cribs from everything he ever loved, from A Taste of Honey, from Elizabeth Smart, from Karel Reisz’s films, everything, including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new ...”

“... of genius, or neargenius – time will decide – who was heart-cloven and split-minded it is Elizabeth Bowen. Romantic-realist, yearning-sceptic, emotional-intellectual, poetic-pragmatist, objective-subjective, gregarious-detached (though everybody who resides in a typewriter has to be a bit of that), tragi-humorous, consistently declaring herself born ...”

“... Contrast this with Maugham’s Senior Cit: Rosie was at least seventy. She was wearing a very smart sleeveless frock of green chiffon, heavily diamanté, cut square at the neck and very short; it fitted like a bursting glove. By her shape I gathered she wore rubber corsets. Her nails were blood-coloured and her eyebrows plucked. She was stout, and she had ...”

“... Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of uncase by stressing how smart and cheerful she, was how little her drug addiction appeared to affect her. Such loyal friends did not wish her to be regarded as a pathological case – although since Kavan had constant access to clean legal drugs there was no reason at all why she should ...”

“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind ...”

“... patient editor and Lord Weidenfeld Whose Idea it Was – these we have grown to expect and honour. Elizabeth Longford, now in her eighties, thanks two family doctors who ‘made life so secure for us’ (and who themselves survived to 90 and 86). She is grateful to one son-in-law for ‘introducing me to the perfect diet during a critical time in the writing ...”