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“... In October 1964, BBC2 put out a programme about literary life in Britain during the Second World War; the contributors included John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly. The show was stolen, however, by a figure in a voluminous overcoat and dark glasses, whose recollections were delivered slowly, deadpan, between puffs on a large cigar. A month later, at the age of 52, Julian Maclaren-Ross died of a heart attack in Ladbroke Grove ...”

“... Returning to her aunt’s villa in Florence in 1899, after an intense but short-lived affair with Axel Munthe, Ottoline Morrell was an ideal candidate to become one of the acolytes who received intellectual instruction and an occasional chaste kiss from the intelligent, abrasive and mannishly attired châtelaine of Il Palmerino in Fiesole. Vernon Lee, as Violet Paget was widely known, was then in her early forties ...”

“... and their cabin-boy had set sail from Leghorn, followed by the ghastly cremations on the beach. Miranda Seymour, in the preface to her new biography, Mary Shelley, confesses to having perpetrated, some twenty-five years ago, a novel (Count Manfred) about Byron. That is by no means unusual. Novels in which Byron appears more or less thinly disguised ...”

“... even feminine-looking women drivers before Hellé began making headlines. In The Bugatti Queen Miranda Seymour informs us that Violette Morris, an athlete and racing driver, had her heavy breasts removed because they interfered with her driving a Donnet. In 1929 Hellé, driving an Omega-Six, won the Grand Prix Féminin at Montlhéry, becoming ‘the ...”

“... it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ideals. Martin Seymour-Smith, Graves’s first biographer and a close friend, traces the demonic bloodlust of the White Goddess all the way back to Graves’s cradle: ‘The infant looked up into its mother’s face, and sensed that – without much ambiguity – she wanted to ...”

“... the time many people consequently spent waiting for other people to die, are recurring themes in Miranda Seymour’s deft and compelling account of the whole horrible saga. Anne Isabella, as she was christened, was the late and much loved only child of ageing parents who doted on her. Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke were justified in admiring their ...”

“... Gordon relies on the work done at this time by Claire Tomalin, Lyndall Gordon, Janet Todd and Miranda Seymour: her innovation is to narrate the lives in alternate chapters, which allows the two stories to echo each other (though the jumps in chronology are confusing). In 1885 the Athenaeum described Wollstonecraft’s life as ‘one of the most ...”

“... life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her defiance than teenage sulks. Her girlish ...”

“... from originaux.’ Perhaps it was easy in the 1870s, but no one now, especially not after reading Miranda Gill’s well-researched and historically sensitive Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in 19th-Century Paris, would claim to know in which cage of the human menagerie each of these specimens belonged. Was the Marquis de Bagueville mad or merely ...”

“... who could probably not remember her, still wanted to picture her lost mother in her glass, like Miranda in The Tempest. Her veiled girlhood tribute is reproduced here in its entirety. The Glass of the Sinful Soul does not make for easy reading now, unless the reader has a special taste for a brand of women’s mysticism that began earlier, in Germany and ...”

“... life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same litanies of complaint, distress and need that fill Vivienne and Tom’s letters ...”

“... Wilson’s thoroughness and sobriety will make this book a valuable resource for scholars. But Miranda Seymour’s Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (1995), which covers the whole of his life in only a few more pages than it takes Moorcroft Wilson to bring us to 1929, remains a better read – partly because ...”