“... to Australia, ‘this time for life-long exile’. It is a novel, you might say, bred out of FordMadox Ford, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, and is by no means without interest. It does not help, though, to say, as Michael Holroyd seems ...”

“... so much on brilliant ‘effects’, successes would be particularly palpable. But further, as FordMadox Ford conveys in innumerable anecdotes of him, Conrad had enormous zest and simply was not a mere limping and suffering victim. Though ...”

“... the predictability itself. ‘Before everything a story must convey a sense of inevitability,’ FordMadox Ford once wrote,that which happens in it must seem to be the only thing that could have happened. Of course a character may cry: ‘If I ...”

“... a point of view and an attitude and – as his pieces did – their own way of saying things (of FordMadox Ford, Clive James wrote in the Listener, ‘the grade A crumpet came at him like kamikazes’). He said he would publish anything as long ...”

“... Toomey’s real-life colleagues in the arts get a bad press. H.G. Wells is ‘a satyromaniac’, FordMadox Ford has bad breath and a dirty mind, Norman Douglas is ‘filthy’ and ‘boy shagging’, T.S. Eliot is wrong about the Tarot pack and ...”

“... that one is tempted to imagine that the best readers of this book might be Henry James and FordMadox Ford. It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to ...”

“... to have time to achieve an understanding of what he was really up to. In some ways he resembles FordMadox Ford, though Ford was much more prolific, indeed embarrassingly ...”

“... lies (or ‘mythology’). But then, the objection suggests itself, Whistler was not quite a FordMadox Ford and did not positively demand to be believed. When he denied that he, a distinguished Southerner, could have been born in the horrid ...”

“... many obstacles as in The Shadow-Line but reaches a different and more wondrous conclusion (Francis Ford Coppola borrowed it for Apocalypse Now, his film version of Heart of Darkness). Touching shore at long last in the dark, Marlow wakes from the sleep of exhaustion to a silent dawn: I opened my eyes … and then I saw the ...”

“... once tried this thought out on a panel on a TV book show when we were talking about a biography of FordMadox Ford. There was general agreement that his had been a tragic life, evidenced by catastrophic love affairs, difficulty in writing and ...”

“... to associate Edwardian male writers with jellied substances: she described being kissed by FordMadox Ford as ‘like being the toast under a poached egg’. Wells wrote about himself and his amours with what he thought was exemplary ...”

“... in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by FordMadox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first novel, Penhally, out loud to him. She was edited by Maxwell Perkins, and had published ...”

“... speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or not, are ready to think defunct: the Britain of FordMadox Ford in 1913-15, which was host to Wyndham Lewis’s earliest paintings, to the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and to Ezra Pound’s ...”

“... when Fay is 12, regales the girls with tales of her prewar meetings in London with figures such as FordMadox Ford, Ezra Pound (who apparently had a habit of playing her piano with his nose when drunk), H.G. Wells and E. Nesbit, who, Weldon’s ...”

“... aware of the new techniques, new styles of ‘treatment’, currently being explored by Conrad and FordMadox Ford, and aware also of the new rules of the game as promulgated by Henry James with his passion for ‘doing’. Bennett greatly admired ...”