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“... surprise ending. Irishness hovers in the backgrounds of Moore’s American Catholics; Molly Keane’s characters are the Protestant Anglo-Irish, inhabiting a decaying estate where Mummie’s room, smelling of violets and kept reverently swept and dusted, still houses the hunting boots and feather boas and silver-backed brushes of long ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”

“... a best-seller in America and Ireland. In early autumn the novel was published in Britain, and Molly Keane joined six others on this year’s somewhat extended list of Booker Prize candidates. One might suspect hype in reports of this extraordinary come-back story. But in fact Good Behaviour is as successful a novel as Deutsch’s hand-outs claim it ...”

“... put me unwillingly on the side of the life-deniers – if only she had been a little quieter. In Molly Keane’s pictures of between-the-wars Anglo-Irish society in decline characters are dealt sharp blows. In Loving and Giving eight-year-old Nicandra (named after a winner which Dada, a very small man, trained and rode in good times before Nicandra was ...”

“... of certain women writers – Eva Gore Booth, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, each of whom has her own chapter – and how they dealt with same-sex love. Some of these women were, as far as we know, gay; others were not. The issues are clearer in other essays – in Éibhear Walshe’s piece on MacLiammóir, for ...”