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“... paces alone in her garden. An aging favourite, she knows the ritual of cleaning-time, the kiss of key in gate and cub led off, moon-eyed, to the far compound. By the pool, the patch of mud that never dries, she puts on speed. July-dark trees close round keepers walking in formation. It’s airless. The sun’s swaddled in white, as if a snow-god, the God who made Siberia, found on abandoning the crude paintbox of the taiga for the south’s half-tones, that he was bored here too and pegged out his blanket to sleep on the hills of Kent, garden of England ...”

“... Clever Gretchen’ and Other Forgotten Tales sets out to right a balance heavily weighted during the age of the great Victorian collectors of fairy-tales, ballads and lore. In that age, of the vapours and Mrs Beeton’s steam puddings, it was considered unlikely that a young woman, hearing of an attractive young man in some distant part of the world, would go off immediately in search of him – or that a judge’s wife would turn from the suet to the lawsuit and make a better job of it than her husband ...”

“... Lenare was founded in 1924 by Leonard Green, whose portrait baptises this collection of society photographs. Facing him is an Unknown Woman, captured at the War’s end in an inverted pigeon’s nest and furs: she was presumably the first and certainly the last unknown woman to confront his lens. Lenare wanted fame and wealth to pose for him, and they did ...”

“... I don’t think my father ever saw Bella. She was small, so small that her eyes and surprisingly large beaky nose came only just over the top of the kitchen table. Her chin – and a very slack mouth that muttered and dribbled in a kind of singsong language I could sometimes understand – were lost to view, below the rim of the thick, much-scoured, gargantuan table ...”

“... Pamela, my grandmother, is in her garden. The photograph shows a woman in the cloche hat and low, belted dress of the early Twenties; the face is smooth, and the jaw more pronounced than in the dreamy pictures of the years before the war. The sun is shining: whoever holds the camera is a favourite, neither a stranger nor a threat. Behind Pamela lies the mock village green she created when the manor at Wilsford was built for her by my grandfather in those years, so distant yet still so near, before the death of Bim ...”

“... Emma Tennant, former editor of the magazine Bananas, has produced a shiny package in the manner of an inter-war weekend book, but in a contemporary idiom to which no one can be indifferent.Am I missing an extra layer of irony here or there? The sense of being mocked by initiates is heightened by the slow-dawning certainty that the Marcus Gutteridge talked to by John Mortimer is a made-up person, a chimera of all those doddering reminiscers (‘Aldous was extremely short-sighted’) whom young literary journalists feel obliged to interview ...”

“... In the 15 years her memoir covers Emma Tennant transformed herself. The poised, if slightly stolid-looking debutante of 1955 was, by the end of the Sixties, a three-times-married, chronically hard-up, left-wing novelist. There was little more to wish for. Given the temper of the times and the Tennant family’s established bohemian tendencies it was not such a surprising trajectory ...”

“... contemporary fiction. One advantage of writing short books is that you can write a lot of them. Emma Tennant’s last novel Queen of Stones appeared only a year ago. It now reappears in paperback. On the archetypal theme of lost children, it combines the factual and circumstantial with vision and nightmare – a newspaper cutting, a social worker’s ...”

“... that this process may already be under way. Jonathan Raban’s Foreign Land and Black Marina by Emma Tennant are, from the formal standpoint, very different kinds of novel, but they share, quite strikingly, an un-English pre-occupation with the problem for the individual of belonging in the modern state. Jonathan Raban is a distinguished travel writer ...”

“... a writer of fiction. Salman Rushdie has written Haroun, an allegory in the form of a fairy-tale; Emma Tennant also strikes a deliberate nursery note with Sisters and Strangers, with Grandmother Dummer (dumber than a goose?) as narrator and two little girls as her audience, learning from her the pitfalls and pleasures that await them when they are ...”

“... as it is, World’s Fair is the best thing of Doctorow’s I’ve read. Boiled down, Emma Tennant’s Adventures of Robina goes like this. The red-haired and beautiful heroine belongs to a rich family, but is herself possessed only of a measly £25,000 which has been locked up in a trust fund. Robina’s parents have mysteriously ...”

“... Frank’s marriage, about his future, and about the great changes coming to the country he loves. Emma Tennant’s new novel, too, offers a comic vision of a country in a state of change: Fifties England, tired and shabby after the war, and looking back, nostalgically, to a more gracious and settled world, is spinning, willy-nilly, towards the Sixties. A ...”

“... even Aidan, whose strangeness is monotonously registered. Finally, the book is sloppily edited. Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London, the more interesting of her two new novels, is a clever updating of the Jekyll and Hyde story – which makes it a sort of companion piece to The Bad Sister (1978), itself an updating of Hogg’s Confessions of a ...”

“... suitable for all the contradictory fantasies and hallucinations that the author wishes to convey. Emma Tennant’s Wild Nights is the most ambitious and the most exciting of these four novels. It gives us reality through the five senses of a child narrator, and is not so much fantasy as a witch’s eye view of the world. ‘I waited for the night journey ...”

“... of a novel – a character who implicitly upbraids his creator for making so much fuss about him. Emma Tennant’s 28-year-long writing career has produced a dazzling variety of fiction. But all her work is marked by a fascination with how traditional literary forms, ideas and topoi can be stretched, pulled and tinkered with. Faustine aligns itself with ...”