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“... 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 ...”

“... which, with all the attendant volumes of correspondence and diaries, made Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West more famous for their unusual private lives than for their works. A benefit offered by this new biography is that all that gossip has to take its place along with the non-marital rest of a life that was certainly full. Its subject was an ...”

“... of his own voice. ‘Never did anyone talk such nonsense as George,’ Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1926. A large part of the problem was Moore’s summary dismissal of contemporaries such as Hardy, James and Conrad. Jealous of his literary fame, Moore was aptly described by Joseph Hone as ‘the least catholic of critics’. It is ...”

“... first collection, The Double Image, which appeared in 1946, earned an appreciative mention from Vita Sackville-West in the Observer, and attracted the attention of Kenneth Rexroth, who chose to include her work in an anthology he was assembling. In the course of their correspondence Rexroth became infatuated with Levertov, even though she was 17 years ...”

“... and Writers is first-rate and reads as though it had been written as a series, though it wasn’t. Vita Sackville-West, for instance, on ‘What do women readers look for?’ (1923), not afraid to be anti-feminist – no one represented in this book is – and very funny about women’s insistence on the human; Elizabeth Taylor on Ivy Compton-Burnett ...”

“... three. Indeed, the three should ideally be four; Garber remarks that the marriage of Harold and Vita Nicolson ‘was a “bisexual marriage” in an unusually complete way, since both of them had same-sex partners’. But why is the Nicolson marriage ‘unusually complete’? Does it not present the only format for a marriage of equals? Isn’t it what all ...”

“... letters of the time are rightly full of indignation, and gratitude for those who saw the point. To Vita Sackville-West she wrote as ‘the person Virginia loved most I think outside her own family’. The drowning and its unexpectedness (‘that possibility never occurred to me’) may later seem to have symbolically brought the life and times of ...”

“... state from Parliament to Government House. Virginia Woolf’s opinion of Victoria, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West of 1939, is as revealing as it is funny: ‘A woman, Victoria Okampo who is the Sybil [Colefax] of Buenos Aires, writes to say she wants to publish something by you in her Quarterly Sur. She is in Paris ... She is immensely ...”

“... with an appreciation of the culture, and the ability to make their own way: Gertrude Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Freya Stark (who, yes, may have been a spy). Iranians themselves were engaged in travel writing as early as the 19th century, when the Safarnameh, the Iranian traveller’s account of going on the Hajj, was almost as popular a genre as ...”

“... and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that.Harold​ Nicolson was writing to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t Lord Channon, much as he longed to be. ‘Why am I not very very rich – and a peer?’ he ...”

“... what they’re cracked up to celebrate. Indeed, it’s often the juiciest biographical subjects, Vita Sackville-West, say, or Kingsley Amis, who anticipate the process, and turn themselves into caricatures and stereotypes in life. There’s a touch of this about Green’s long years of decline, when he drank himself silly, and retreated into an ...”

“... The generic description for such people is ‘bedint’, a term borrowed from Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West; meaning, I suppose, someone who serves, whose manners are appropriate to a subordinate station. They might be ‘Liverpool Geordies’ (it’s hard to tell one bedint from another) or educated at a redbrick university, in which case they ...”

“... since she was the offspring of peasants, it took a different form. Late in life the artist told Vita Sackville-West that Beuret had attached herself to him ‘comme une bête’ – less ‘like a crazy person’, as Butler has it, than ‘like a dumb animal’. (Butler earlier quotes Alexandre Dumas on the ‘trainloads of young people’ arriving ...”

“... vacations as an auxiliary land girl on a large farm in Devon.) The doyenne of the detractors was Vita Sackville-West. She organised a large area for the Land Army and had a wider knowledge of it than Sissinghurst alone could provide, but that did not stop her from being patronising and inaccurate. I was intrigued by her account of ‘us’. Apparently ...”

“... Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy Compton-Burnett, the gallery owner Betty Parsons – even the kooky, spooky, more-than-a-little-ropey Patricia Highsmith, a gothic late-life pal, intriguingly, of Murphy’s. It’s true that the ...”