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“... in the big drawing-room curtains which I thought I had mended once and for all. Jill Benton’s Naomi Mitchison lies on the sofa ignored by its subject, who is correcting proofs of a book of short stories. Is a biography of someone living acceptable? Is it likely to be true, or fair? Biography isn’t just the record of a life, or a life and work, but ...”

“... of the African predicament is visible. There could be no better complement to this sad book than Naomi Mitchison’s Images of Africa. The images give the other picture, the African side of things, expressed in tales and fables. In ‘The Coming of the New God’, one of the more bitter tales, Protestant missionaries offer to protect villagers’ lands ...”

“... promising poet. In September 1930 Auden’s Poems came out. ‘Dare I spot him as a winner?’ Naomi Mitchison asked in one of the earliest reviews. A few months later William Empson wrote at some length about ‘Paid on Both Sides’. He was impressed by Auden’s ability to make ‘psychoanalysis, surrealism, and all that’, all the irrationalist ...”

“... for its Summer Exhibition (much to Lewis’s pretend outrage). He painted the Scottish novelist Naomi Mitchison looking down at him with one eyebrow raised, as though gently mocking his radical pretentions. Lewis’s series of portraits of his second wife, Gladys Hoskyns, show the same attention he paid to machines and artillery in the war, attention ...”

“... There was a laboratory on the ground floor of the house where J.B.S. and his younger sister, Naomi (later, as Naomi Mitchison, a prolific writer and political campaigner), grew up. Haldane wrote later that from an early age he had associated scientific experiments with play. Soon, he even joined his father in ...”

“... Place and Charlton; also Carradale, in Argyllshire, home of another grande dame of the Left, Naomi Mitchison (‘In the morning Naomi would say “Shall I shoot a sheep for dinner?” ’). At a Labour Conference in Birmingham in 1936 the author was involved in a ‘ludicrous scene’. While fastening her ...”

“... to supper, Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, Arnold Wesker and his wife Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay Anderson, Fenella Fielding. A Portuguese couple, described to me as ‘a poet in exile and his ...”

“... came to think of his own memorability as an ambiguous gift, and when in later years his old friend Naomi Mitchison regretted that he no longer wrote memorable poems, Auden answered: ‘If, by memorability, you mean a poem like “Sept 1, 1939”, I pray to God that I shall never be memorable again.’ He blamed no one but himself for his failings, but he ...”

“... a ‘humiliation’ – but for others it opened a door onto the world. Having a British passport, Naomi Mitchison remarked, made her feel like ‘the spiritual heir of all the milords who have in the grand commercial past swaggered over the continent’. There are still plenty of milords a’swaggering. I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I think ...”

“... has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with ...”