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“... her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by another woman, allowed Miss St ...”

“... as much romance into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion for each other was to be the subject of an early novel by ...”

“... Once Troublesome Let them call her a wicked old woman! She knew she was no such thing. Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent It isn’t New Year yet so Happy What? Till then, it’s Boxing Day every morning. Empty bags hang off the radiators. Chilly: hot                       cold                                  Cordelia position ...”

“... Neglected Poets, along with many whom, in his day, he despised: Humbert Wolfe, for example, and Vita Sackville-West and Edward Shanks. Can it be that he belongs in such forgotten company? Is his a just neglect? Reading the life, one must conclude that if he indeed had a genuine poetic gift, he had other qualities of mind and character that worked ...”

“... Nineteen twenty-seven was a fine year to be Vita Sackville-West. She was 35, attaining what her son would call her ‘tumultuous maturity’, besieged by lovers. Her elegy to Kentish life, The Land, had won the Hawthornden Prize, and she was hesitantly revising her earlier, somewhat churlish opinions of her own talent ...”

“... presumably not the one Woolf was wearing when she went to see the latest Stravinsky ballet with Vita Sackville-West just before she visited Garsington, ‘a sort of top-hat made of straw with two orange feathers like Mercury’s wings’, Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson. It ‘pleased Virginia ...”

“... of Women” ’. Woolf may have intended her mock-biography as an affectionate portrait of Vita Sackville-West, but Isobel Grundy is surely right in thinking that these episodes in Orlando’s career were primarily inspired by the life and letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Of course Lady Mary was not herself Britain’s Ambassador to the ...”

“... came to the islands in 1946 as guests of Nicolson’s father, Nigel (son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West). They lasted a night. Wakened by noisy rats, they screamed. Nigel would have to row them back out to a fishing boat in the morning. But he had forgotten to tie up his dinghy, which had drifted out and shattered on the rocks: ‘Nigel ...”

“... success, it cannot be regarded as anything but a disaster in terms of Nicolson’s public career. Vita Sackville-West was the daughter of Lord Sackville. Had she been a boy, she would have inherited Knole, one of the most famous country houses in England, together with the estates entailed in the male line upon her cousin Eddy. She bitterly resented this ...”

“... side, Camilla’s relatives are racier still. Her great-aunt was Violet Trefusis, the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Even better, her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was Edward VII’s official mistress. It may be more than mere chance that the role of maîtresse-en-titre to the Prince of Wales runs in the family. Tyrrel says that, as a child, Camilla ...”

“... him as a broadcaster and because, for three years, she had a passionate love affair with his wife, Vita Sackville-West, based a character in his novel Public Faces on her. ‘Jane Campbell’ is described as ‘girlish’ and viewed in the discomforting terms that presumably went through the minds of her male colleagues. ‘How tight, how trim, her skirt ...”

“... his airs, and not a little because of them, it was to this public that Nicolson, like his consort Vita Sackville-West, was really attuned, and the Thirties were the great age of the middlebrow. If James Lees-Milne has a fault as Nicolson’s biographer, it is one which is understandable in a friend of his subject’s and of the family – that of being ...”

“... becoming a kind of stratigraphic layer in an archaeological dig. The novels of Disraeli, Vita Sackville-West, Georges Sand and Jack London and the plays of Clifford Odets come to mind. Gabriele D’Annunzio is now best known as a historical figure, as a dandy-poet in Fin-de-Siècle Rome, celebrated for his flamboyant, scandalous love-life and ...”

“... period of ‘confinement’. Harold Nicolson pushed verbal restraint to its limit in a note to Vita Sackville-West shortly after the birth of their son in 1914: ‘Give a hug from me to that odd little funny which happened the other day.’ Revulsion for the maternal body persisted. The journalist Drusilla Beyfus, who had three pregnancies in the late ...”

“... prominent figures in this extraordinary sapphic society – Radclyffe Hall, Natalie Barney, Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Mercedes de Acosta, Gluck, Djuna Barnes, Ida Rubenstein, Romaine Brooks, Elsie de Wolfe, Eileen Gray, Wanda Landowksa, Winaretta Singer, Rose O’Neill, Violet Trefusis, Janet Flanner and numerous others – demand ...”