“... worker manipulating the robot on the shop floor, every salesman in his dark suit, every jean-clad punk on his motorcycle, and every dedicated Marxist, has read some chapters of The Tale of Genji (and of the Pillow Book of the same period). Many of the residents of one of the noisiest capital cities in the world, living under an often hazy, polluted ...”

“... I was before the war,’ she wrote in 1979. ‘Perhaps if I took to the bottle like poor Jean Rhys . . . it would help.’ In the end, for all her anti-feminism, it was the sisters who saved her. Carmen Callil’s newly founded publishing house, Virago, managed to wrest her work from Collins and relaunched her as a Modern Classic. Lehmann, a ...”

“... As with James, iron discipline was none the less the order of the day; the dismal bohemianism of a Jean Rhys would have been unthinkable to Bowen, who also hated sex being treated at all physically: both novels and stories are rich with her own kind of respectability. As distinctions and divisions crumbled in her imagination, her style took on an ever ...”

“... seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or conspiracy to semi-oblivion – the novelist Valéry Larbaud, ‘the poet of first-class travel’, and the Russian short story writer Ivan Bunin. Bunin could evoke the transient but potent ...”

“... Outpost of Progress’. I read that story as part of my apprenticeship. Later he saw that Jean Rhys had had a clear vision of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea and other works, and she became one of the very few living novelists he recommended.But he also said that even bad writing was revealing – sometimes more revealing than skilful ...”

“... is saddled with an unloving fiancé, whose ‘half-baked and half-hearted’ proposal suggests the Jean Rhys line: ‘Oh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.’ Philip brings ‘all his strength and youth’ to working in the Treasury and is a total dullard: the sort of person Tonks must have been thinking about when she wrote about her ...”

“... this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content ...”

“... vehement in her dislike of slightly older women writers, such as Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and Jean Rhys, whom she claimed to find victim-like. Such women also, one can’t help but notice, had the fragile slightness her mother had but she didn’t, in their bodies and in their works. Even after giving birth herself, Ward Jouve noted, Carter never ...”

“... films of the 1940s (John Huston, not Hitchcock and Hawks) and ‘natural’ foreign directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls and Vittorio de Sica. In 1967, she lamented the frustrated career of Orson Welles, someone who could ‘unify’ educated and uneducated audiences – the quality that makes movies ‘a great popular art form’.If I felt that Kael was ...”

“... Small rituals fix a wandering identity. Stoic breakdown is Didion’s territory, as it was Jean Rhys’s, Colette’s and, now, Lydia Davis’s – connoisseurs of isolation and erotic obsession. Rhys’s heroines suffer because of accidents and psychological peculiarities (unlucky throws of the dice), while ...”

“... were written by the great French composer Georges Auric, a member with Poulenc and Tailleferre of Jean Cocteau’s Les Six. The Lavender Hill Mob is often seen as a gentle caper comedy, but wrapped up inside this genre piece is a powerful fantasy of escape. Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness, the film’s partners in crime, are at heart romantics and dreamers ...”

“... period.Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless NightsOh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.Jean Rhys, QuartetThe​ image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is ...”