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“... are now well into the Great Vegetable Revolution. ‘For the majority of the population,’ writes Jane Grigson, ‘vegetables as a delight, to be eaten on their own, belong to this century, even to the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits ...”

“... Be modern – worship food,’ exhorts the cover of The Official Foodie Handbook. One of the ironies resulting from the North/South dichotomy of our planet is the appearance of this odd little book, a vade mecum to a widespread and unashamed cult of conspicuous gluttony in the advanced industrialised countries, at just the time when Ethiopia is struck by a widely publicised famine, and the rest of Africa is suffering a less widely publicised one ...”

“... may lack the sprightliness and range of the scholar-gypsies among British cookery writers – Jane Grigson, Claudia Roden – and his Calvinist tendency to self-examination at inappropriate moments might also prove a deterrent: ‘I know that I have often diminished my table companions’ pleasure in a meal that would otherwise have ravished them by ...”

“... than men do. Other things being equal, readers of the same sex will be closer to the meaning of Jane Austen, for instance, than their male counterparts. Where there is a choice, women’s commentary is given priority in the attached bibliographical notes. They know best. This Companion is at least two things. Primarily it is a reference book, a convenient ...”

“... reader to envisage. When the modern reader makes the transition from merely dreaming along with Jane Grigson or Delia Smith to trying a recipe, the imperatives resume their familiar role. But this cannot have been the case with a book such as Household Management, or not for much of the time. How did the following sentence function? ‘Send [the ...”

“... The publication of three substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark ...”

“... and Wordsworth less ‘essentially poetic’ than Shelley and Blake, and deprecated what he called Jane Austen’s universe of undertones. During the Thirties he found in Auden ‘a definite backsliding in the technique of verse’, and regretted that he was ‘aping the antics of Kipling and Byron’. It is a mark of the division in Read that he was both ...”

“... skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as the ‘Rupert Brooke of the Depression’.) Isherwood, he grudgingly conceded, could claim ‘accomplishment’. Isherwood returned the tepid compliment, 12 years later, with a script for the Tony Richardson production of The Loved One. The movie ...”

“... fiction brings the comment: ‘This is what British criticism has descended to.’ Geoffrey Grigson’s dislike of his ‘coarse and unattractive personality’ is mentioned, repeated, finally repaid by a feeble satirical sonnet. A look at Grigson on Alvarez would have shown him how it should be done. ‘Coarse and ...”

“... what is certainly a chilling and gossipy account of Auden’s personal habits, she quotes Geoffrey Grigson’s ‘beautiful tribute’ to Auden’s ‘great poetry’ in which we find ‘explicit recipes for being human’. Grigson might seem an odd model for benevolence, but it is appropriate that Hardwick’s book ends ...”

“... Neo-Romantic poetasters, mostly, with Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell as potential allies, Geoffrey Grigson lurking threateningly in the wings and T.S. Eliot a very distant god. The former Muriel Camberg joined this cast in 1944 after a stint in southern Africa, where she’d ended a short marriage to the unstable if catchily named Sydney Spark. She was armed ...”

“... the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of ...”