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“... enough about her to put up with her and even, decades later, to write a biography designed, as Hilary Spurling’s explicitly is, to stem ‘the tide of venom that pursued her into and beyond the grave’. The venom was largely a result of the way, as George Orwell’s widow, she managed the literary estate. She was deemed to be tyrannical, grasping ...”

“... and her family in the life of Henri Matisse was one of the revelations of the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s pioneering biography: The Unknown Matisse. For more than twenty years, the Humberts were a major force in the social and political life of the Third Republic, until, in 1902, their legendary wealth was exposed as a hoax. The famous ...”

“... how the West thinks about China. ‘What Dickens had done for London’s 19th-century poor,’ Hilary Spurling writes in her new biography, ‘Pearl Buck did for the working people of 20th-century China,’ with American affinity for the Chinese swelling just as Japan invaded the mainland. It didn’t last, of course, any more than Buck’s literary ...”

“... The subtitle Hilary Spurling has given to the second half of her biography of Henri Matisse is upbeat and triumphant, in line with orthodox interpretations of the painter’s career: ‘The Conquest of Colour’. To place the volume still more squarely in line with exhibition-poster stereotypes, she has capped that with ‘Matisse the Master ...”

“... migraine. The friends naturally tended to blame her. Penny, in an unpublished manuscript of which Spurling makes considerable use, says they were ‘two people estranged from one another ... sitting in a silence that bordered on enmity’. He never attacked his wife or children physically, but they were terrified of the constant sneer on his face when he ...”

“... This is the second and final volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of I. Compton-Burnett, and it comes to us ten years after the first. During this interval has Mrs Spurling been attending to other things? So abundant, so heavily pendulous upon the bough, are the fruits of research now offered to us (so very thick, we may say, has grown the ivy elegantly disposed on the present dust-jacket as on the last) that nothing of the kind need be supposed ...”

“... as students in a full-blown academic tradition and to reject the conventions and skills it taught. Hilary Spurling, in her biography of Matisse, describes his attempt to copy Chardin’s work: He began with The Pipe, which was the first painting he ever copied in the Louvre, and which baffled him with an elusive blue on the padded lid of the box in the ...”

“... them with precision. Sincerity should be the same thing as clarity, but isn’t. Fortunately Hilary Spurling has provided an introduction to this book which is an excellent short study in its own right, and explains who everyone was and, as far as tact allows, what happened. She points out, for example, that Alison had no idea of the nature of ...”

“... a picture you must have some way of establishing its absence – shadow. In Matisse’s pictures, Hilary Spurling writes, ‘light is not so much reproduced as emitted or in Matisse’s own words “provoked”’. He did not find colour combinations of more or less equal tonality and saturation which, none the less, read as bright and shaded. That is ...”

“... within his work the vexed question of the place of the ‘wry’ in English literature. Perhaps Hilary Spurling, who is working on the official biography of Powell, will address some of these questions. She may also pay more attention to Powell’s magnificent biography of John Aubrey, John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), arguably the key to ...”

“... tenuously linked to the tradition which had nurtured him. Now that we have the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography, however, it is much easier to look back beyond the white-bearded maker of images of luxuriousness to the wild-man-of-art shown in the self-portrait of 1906 and to be reminded that – as one soon learns from the letters he ...”

“... and significance has, over the century, become an idée reçue. Here it is, as related by Hilary Spurling in her biography of Matisse: ‘For years [sic] he also wrote a national newspaper column, consisting entirely of more or less offbeat items collected from the press and retailed with a terse, disconcerting wit which raised the news round-up ...”

“... higher than any tariff. But A Dance is not, of course, simply or as such a comic novel. Years ago Hilary Spurling described it best, in terms Cao would have grasped immediately. ‘The whole sequence unfolds in both real and fictional time like a Chinese scroll painting, a vast canvas streaked with violence and perturbation, suffused with humour, at once ...”

“... a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his ...”

“... Henri): Écran tapisserie sur un carton d’André Derain. Her hatmaking, we learn from Hilary Spurling’s biography, had time and again kept her various families afloat.* In 1895, aged 23, she had gone to work for Aunt Nine, owner of the Grande Maison des Modes on the boulevard Saint-Denis. She did so because her father had just been thrown ...”