“... life. ‘You’re out of your decorative gourd,’ I told him, and thought of that old unquotable Rebecca West distinction, that men are lunatics and women are idiots – though Rebecca West herself was such a lunatic exception to the rule that whole cocktail parties must have fallen silent when she made this ...”

“... able to consult many surviving friends of Ford, including Allen Tate, Herbert Read, Jean Rhys and Rebecca West. He also had access to the papers of Ford’s mistress Violet Hunt and the Ford collections in various American libraries, notably those of Cornell and Princeton. Judd and Saunders were denied by death of useful contemporary testimony, except ...”

“... Pringle and Lennie Goodings. Carmen exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed ...”

“... her independent. Independence made her Elizabeth. ‘It is by independence we live,’ she wrote. Rebecca West, who competed later with the Countess as a lover of H.G. Wells, was wrong in calling the book ‘a not too creditable early success’. There was no shortage, in the 1890s, of enigmatic, slight-seeming, best-selling novels – Beatrice ...”

“... make it cosy. In the run-up to the Munich Agreement, the drama critic Alexander Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West that he had the ‘impression from a fairly faithful reading of Dorothy Thompson in the Herald Tribune that she may sail at any minute in order to strangle Neville Chamberlain’.After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, opinion pollsters asked ...”

“... people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed untroubled that he would hang. Rebecca West, reporting the trial for the New Yorker, was surprised at the equanimity with which the jury sent him to the gallows: they came back from considering their verdict ‘as if they had been out for a cup of tea’. At the start of the war, BBC ...”

“... in his essay to the structure of the plays, although he analyses the scene in Rosmersholm in which Rebecca West admits to John Rosmer that she unintentionally provoked Rosmer’s wife, Beate, into killing herself. We know there were two reasons for this: Rebecca’s ambition for Rosmer’s life’s mission (to which Mrs ...”

“... early novels were done made them look like the literary future, not just to Evelyn Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the ...”

“... of 1953/4 (and collected in a volume published by Vintage Books in the US with an introduction by Rebecca West). There is none of the epic grandeur of the Minotaur etchings, but the displays of whores and models and clowns, and the ritual sacrifices, rapes and vigils, have a phantasmagoric character which is often both genuinely menacing and funny. Here ...”

“... he could not have been at ease in Bloomsbury with people like Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Rebecca West. Yet the book gives few insights into the character of his mind. His artistic tastes were mainly formed by conversation and travel. With Ivor Montagu and other friends he helped to found the Film Society in 1925, as a means of introducing the ...”

“... is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it looks. Being a ...”

“... and at 60 there was perhaps a hint of failure or at any rate of a new sobriety in Shaw. Rebecca West wrote of his performance in a wartime speech: ‘The passing of middle age has wiped the aggressive strangeness from his face, by mitigating with silver the redness of his hair and the irate thrust of his eyebrows, and has revealed a predominant ...”

“... Murder in the Cathedral) wrote If you make charges, Then in public I will refute them, and when Rebecca West wrote The case against most of them must have been so easily refuted that they could hardly rank at suspects, both writers could be assured that their use of refute was beyond reproach. At some point in the second half of the ...”

“... paper gave space to Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, the young Rebecca West (briefly) and Osbert Sitwell, in addition to G.D.H. Cole and the gifted cartoonist Will Dyson. Later, as leader of the Labour Party in the 1930s, Lansbury presided over a renaissance of intellectual socialism, as Fabians, Socialist ...”

“... described herself as the kind of New Woman people used to write about long ago, and her friend Rebecca West, who joined the staff of the Freewoman in 1911, as a prototype of the ‘Newest Woman’. The gap opens within The Unlit Lamp itself. For although the novel is radical in its acknowledgment of the Newest Woman, it is written from the point of ...”