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“... The interest of memories – or memoirs – depends on what someone has to remember and the terms in which they do so. Frances Partridge was born in 1901: she spans the century – a rich enough field, one would think. And her previous book, A Pacifist’s War, is eminently, even compulsively readable: personal recollection is tethered to public events; the immediacy of her wartime diary allows the reader to share the depression, the sinking in the stomach, the fragmented moments of ordinary living ...”

“... The title of Shiela Grant Duff’s book refers to the history of the Thirties – to the savaging of private lives by public events – but more specifically to her intense, emotional and eventually embittered relationship with Adam von Trott. She and von Trott met at Oxford, in the brief deceptive sunshine before the rise of the Nazis; von Trott was to die in 1944, shot for his part in the plot against Hitler ...”

“... in terms of cause and effect. In the words of Howard Beamish, one of the central characters in Penelope Lively’s new novel, reality ‘has never been quite so devastatingly random’. This is the problem Lively addresses in Cleopatra’s Sister. To her credit, she has never fought shy of ideas, and in some ...”

“... be to have a bloody-minded teenaged daughter. Treasures of Time, a subtle and intelligent book by Penelope Lively, takes its title from that of a fictitious television programme on the life and work of Hugh Paxton, archaeologist. The programme and its making provide the framework of the story. This is a clever technical device, given one of the main ...”

“... the possibility that fiction can be popular and wholly convincing. Nobody needs to be told that Penelope Lively can deal convincingly with any possibility. I gather, however, that this is an author whose ordinary competence can sometimes flower into magic. For my part, I am always ready to settle for ordinary competence, as something brilliantly ...”

“... Farley’s rusks and warm milk. Scatological and eschatological considerations do not impinge on Penelope Lively’s ordered English world, where the sun shines out of the sky and not out of anyone’s arse and where the prospect of eclipse in the long night of a nuclear winter never enters anyone’s head. The book’s determination to keep clear of ...”

“... by way of a thigh-band, flops to the grass and with unimpaired instinct snakes towards the Lode. Penelope Livery’s Perfect Happiness is concerned with a woman’s bereavement: ‘Frances, sitting with hands folded and face blank, recollecting not in tranquillity but in ripe howling grief her husband Steven dead now eight months two weeks one day’. It ...”

“... apes’, and this is more eloquent than many of Duffy’s human tragedies. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively is a Second World War story concealed within a broader narrative. Claudia Hampton, a best-selling popular historian, looks back over her life from the hospital bed in which she is slowly dying. She claims, perhaps deliriously, to be writing a ...”

“... discontent that presides over this book made me suspect that the stories for children with which Penelope Lively made her reputation were of the kind admired by progressive parents rather than by children themselves. However, my consultant in the 10-11 age group speaks of them with warm approval, and Mrs Lively’s ...”

“... on the more established but just as frivolous system of polite compromise and Moore lost out to Penelope Lively. Trevor McDonald, writing in the next morning’s Independent, revealed that ‘what decided the issue in the end was the fact that their feeling against Moore was stronger than their views about ...”

“... that families are at their most tenacious when they fall short of what we feel entitled to expect. Penelope Lively has never been reluctant to identify with the domestic proficiencies of English fiction. Writing for children has been among its most assured traditions, and it may have been Lively’s numerous books for ...”

“... be borne in mind. If the intention is merely to entertain in an avowedly lightweight work, as in Penelope Lively’s Fanny and the Battle of Potter’s Piece, only a pedant would insist that it is always necessary to include glimpses of less pleasant aspects of the past as well. But although it is fun to read about Victorian family games in large ...”

“... goings-on are not just suburban goings-on, as they might be in the fiction of Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively. Instead, they raise questions of tradition and modernity, of pure-hearted rural Gaeldom v. decadent urban gayness, which touch the nerve of a nation increasingly divided between the Treaty of Rome and the Bishop of Rome, between secular ...”

“... and Sparks’’ Lucy Ellmann is prepared to consider ‘waitressing and prostitution’’ Penelope Lively is hoping to be offered a job as writer-in-residence on an oil-rig and Hilary Mantel thinks she could handle a stint of ‘collecting supermarket trolleys from far-flung parking bays’ (and adds: ‘Do not worry that you are depriving some ...”

“... mixing and matching many different taste sensations. In other words, it is not like a novel by Penelope Lively. It will not set you up; nor will it tell you how to live. That is not what it is for. The mother-type of these feast-like compilations is The Arabian Nights Entertainment – note the word ‘entertainment’. That shambolic anthology of ...”