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“... detract from the book’s extraordinary sensitivity and sure touch in historical reconstruction. Emma Tennant is the least predictable of novelists. Her last effort, The Adventures of Robina, recalled the perils of adolescence and sexual initiation in the late 1950s (a decade in which the author is clearly very interested) using the antique burlesque of ...”

“... with the help. Loving, for instance, reverses the Maud/ Mabel set-up, with Anglo-Irish nobs Mrs Tennant and her careless, adulterous daughter-in-law Mrs Jack playing bit parts in the lives of their servants. The plot stages an ingenious double-take: Mrs Jack is caught in flagrante by the maid bringing in her breakfast, because what the servants see ...”

“... forest again, to fall down ‘the red hole in the earth’. Regeneration is obscurely forecast. Tennant clearly shares with Malcolm Bradbury the belief that 1957 marks the fall in recent British history. She could also be taken to bear out Bradbury’s other, more controversial contention: that there is a Modernist tradition which matters in post-war ...”

“... In order to envisage the curious achievement of Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones, you must first imagine that Virginia Woolf has rewritten Lord of the Flies. Interior monologues and painfully acute perceptions of a seaside landscape combine to colour in what is essentially a tale of a group of girls wrecked on a desert island ...”

“... V.S. Pritchett is encountered in ‘a handsome terrace to the north of Regent’s Park’, and Emma Tennant in ‘a comfortably and attractively bruised Victorian house off Ladbroke Grove’. Russell Hoban’s ‘terraced house’ is also ‘comfortable’ but it seems to be a shade down-market, ‘fronting Eel Brook Common’. Salman Rushdie’s ...”

“... that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world.’ Ted Hughes, as quoted by Emma Tennant, weighs in on ‘Nappies’: ‘“I can’t change nappies,” Ted said. It was clear that this wasn’t a failure of skills which he regretted; he was saying he can’t and won’t; and yet I’ve not asked him to do this, nor – if he had ...”

“... farm mentioned in the poem was later the site of a castle, and that ‘the 20th-century novelist Emma Tennant’ spent some of her childhood there. Miller reads the work in a similar way. Hogg’s early dramatic tales have ‘the interest of their anticipations’; All-Hallow Eve ‘is predictive of what he went on to write’. What he went on to ...”

“... of his complex juggling of simultaneous affairs, a number of which had already been revealed by Emma Tennant in her memoir, Burnt Diaries (1999), and by Elaine Feinstein in her biography of Hughes from 2001. Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of ...”

“... Christened Emma after her mother, whose later influence upon her was slight, the 11th of Sir Charles Tennant’s 15 children – three were born after he had remarried at the age of 75 – was to become famous and indeed notorious as Margot. W.E. Gladstone, allegedly more captivated by the challenge of the rhyme than by the personality of the 25-year-old woman who visited him at Hawarden in 1889, composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ...”

“... tapestries after Ned’s designs, for example, and to teach George Du Maurier’s wife, Emma, how to join her in cutting woodblocks from which their husbands’ illustrations could be printed. But these efforts amounted to little. Though the Memorials make clear that Georgie regretted her exclusion from the studio, it isn’t clear how much this ...”