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“... Beginning in the middle, as she announces at once she intends to do, Sybille Bedford starts her memoir in 1953, the middle, more or less, of her long life and of ‘our frightful century’ whose history is as much her subject as her own peculiar story. Her opening scene is a summer morning in Geneva, where she passed a few hours between trains, a woman in her early forties, ‘free to live where, if not how, I chose’, a neutral observer in a neutral country ...”

“... went up first in Kiel, then in Berlin on 9 November, when Wilhelm II was deposed. Seven-year-old Sybille Bedford, meanwhile, was on a train with her amazing, ludicrously flighty mother, trying to get back to the family château in Baden from the seaside resort where, presumably, Lisa had been meeting up with one of her many lovers.At one point we were ...”

“... It’s a characteristic of all Sybille Bedford’s fiction to tell the reader less than he wants to know. Ivy Compton-Burnett was a friend of hers and perhaps gave her lessons in leaving things out. She calls Jigsaw, which has to do with her own early life, ‘a biographical novel’; and it may not be a coincidence that the book’s most sympathetic reviewers have been those who seem already to know her life story ...”

“... 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 Notable British Trials series, published by William Hodge and Company, ran from 1905 ...”

“... sums up an entire way of life. It is no surprise to discover that Mrs David admires the novels of Sybille Bedford, nor that she was a friend of Norman Douglas. It is a little surprising that she has never turned her acclaimed prose style to fiction, but has always restricted herself to culinary matters, if in the widest sense: taking aboard aspects of ...”

“... it with two pages of almost verbatim quotation from a 1966 article about the Auschwitz trials by Sybille Bedford. The character makes no comment on the extract, but the pattern of emotional disengagement Bedford reports has clear resonances within the novel, which is built round the need for the young convalescent ...”

“... where Erika began an affair with a German doctor who was staying at her hotel. According to Sybille Bedford, she ‘went off women, she really became interested in men, she went off with people’s husbands even.’ Klaus had an affair with an American dancer. The Peppermill was to be performed in New York with its European cast. Although the ...”

“... off for ‘lecturing’ the court: ‘You are not at Leicester University at the moment.’ Sybille Bedford, sitting in the gallery, felt that Griffith-Jones stressed the word ‘Leicester’. Hoggart too recalled a slight pause before Griffith-Jones named the university, ‘as if he had to recover the name of so insignificant a place from the ...”

“... father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold ...”

“... may have had an affair.) They shared friends and lovers, or at least lovers-in-law, on occasion. (Sybille Bedford floats around in this book like a benign sapphic putto.) And though residing in different places at different times, all of them moved for more than half a century in the same impossibly glamorous literary and artistic circles in ...”

“... Throughout his fiction there’s a puritan unease about the emasculating effect of sex. Sybille Bedford, Huxley’s first biographer, notes his distaste for promiscuity, ‘which spends itself purposely, without producing love or even, in the long run, amusement’. After Many a Summer, Time Must Have a Stop and The Genius and the Goddess all ...”

“... experience and practice of writing, in private notebooks and letters to colleague-confidants like Sybille Bedford. Some notebooks, undated, contain particularly distressing passages: Week after week of dead pages . . . I have no discipline in work hours, no order in my mind, no theories of literature, no universal view of anything. Oh I am ...”

“... received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s ...”

“... It is also an extremely difficult read. It was felicitously summed up in an English newspaper by Sybille Bedford as ‘relentlessly abstract, slow, cluttered, static, curiously oppressive; reading it feels like sitting in a hot-house without a watch.’ Marriage to Günther Stern, with whom she had lived, did not work out at all well. He was a promising ...”

“... drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result of some artfully displaced ‘affair’ but of the existence of Rushdie ...”