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“... with a variety of women in addition to his wife. One of Wells’s most famous liaisons was with Rebecca West, mother of the author of the latest Wells biography. They met in 1912 when she was 19, he 45. He was an established novelist and social critic, she an ambitious young feminist author, who was beginning to make a name for herself by tart and ...”

“... The Young Rebecca is a collection of the writings of Rebecca West from 1911 to 1917, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus, with just the right amount of explanation and comment. In one respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title ...”

“... English writers in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for the place of honour. Between these three women enough power should have been generated even for an impossible cause. They were tireless collectors of facts – Rose used to take her newspaper-cuttings everywhere – and ...”

“... Rebecca West liked short men. Towards the end of her life a young journalist went to interview her. He arrived late, to hear West’s companion announce: ‘He’s worth waiting for!’ When West appeared her face fell. ‘Oh, you’re tall,’ she said damningly ...”

“... Rebecca West died 17 years ago at 90, in a comfortable flat overlooking Hyde Park. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, to her amusement and gratification. Will she be remembered more as a character, thoroughly damely and commanding, or for her writings? Eleven novels, of no outstanding literary merit; nine other books on general subjects, of which the most admired (and especially relevant today) is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on Yugoslavia; a mass of articles on the public affairs of her time ...”

“... According to Rebecca West, F. Tennyson Jesse was ‘ideally beautiful. I have never seen a lovelier girl.’ A sketch in Joanna Colenbrander’s biography shows a flat, winsome face with wide, rather fishy eyes; her thin limbs are splayed out with flapperish elegance. It may be that her attractions – a fat bundle of love-letters was destroyed when she died, and Mrs Colenbrander finds several witnesses to testify to her ‘aura’ – had less to do with ideal beauty than with loquaciousness and flair ...”

“... of A.K. Blakemore’s first novel, The Manningtree Witches (2021), is a 19-year-old woman called Rebecca West. She lives with her tough, rowdy mother, the Beldam West, and their cat, Vinegar Tom, in a cramped cottage on the outskirts of Manningtree, a small port town in north Essex where the Stour widens into an ...”

“... on? Loyalties does, in its mysterious way, say more about the subject promised by its title than Rebecca West managed with The Meaning of Treason. She was not very good at moralising, because of her strong tendency to be self-righteous and unfair. But she was good at creating female characters and presenting grand scenes through their eyes. Cousin ...”

“... to kill herself in front of him, and a few (not many) prostitutes. And there was also of course Rebecca West, whom he called his ‘panther’, and by whom he had a son (whose middle name was Panther) in 1914. West was particularly critical of his writing about sex: ‘His prose,’ she wrote, ‘suddenly loses its ...”

“... Rebecca West said that Olive Schreiner was a ‘geographical fact’. Others were reminded of a natural force, admired and dreaded, unchecked by illness, war or poverty, something new coming out of Africa. To fit her into the history of South Africa, of literature or of women’s movements is an exhausting business ...”

“... his own company, Royal Securities, he became profitably engaged in the municipal utilities of the West Indies through such companies as Trinidad Electric Company; he aspired to finance trams in Quito, Equador and got involved with equivalent enterprises in Brazil and Jamaica. The financial career only lasted ten years, was improvisatory at the corners and ...”

“... that it should come out only after the death in 1983 of his father’s most celebrated lover, Rebecca West.) Wells insisted that his tribute to Jane be prefixed to this memoir of his vie amoureuse to provide the full picture, or, at least, the full picture as he liked to see it. His account is inevitably selective but also surprisingly ...”

“... from sexual jealousy: this is the picture given also by others, including Wells’s son Anthony West. It is just that there is so much more that one would like to know about her, and would need to be told if the autobiography were to be really satisfying. As for H.G. Wells in Love, it consists of two unequal portions. First there is a long ‘Postscript to ...”

“... exhibition makes much of the telegram Walter Sickert sent Lewis in 1932. The pencil portrait of Rebecca West, Sickert said, proved Lewis to be ‘the greatest portraitist of this or any other time’. Sickert would probably not have committed his telegraphic praise of the portraits to print. On the other hand Lewis’s rhythmic curves and hard lines ...”

“... in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in 1957 is ‘generally regarded as the finest single volume account of a criminal trial ever written’. The ...”