“... with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one recalls how affectionately she brought her father back in The fountain overflows, one concludes that Barker is her Blakean partner, the tank that contains. She wants to write an autobiography, but is unwilling to give anything away. As ...”

“... might have done after 1912 – but on a glorious defeat, with all its connotations of vengeance. Rebecca West noticed this habit of clinging to victimhood in her Serbian guide, Constantine, in the late Thirties: It was as if he were a very sick man, for he was sleepy, fretful, inferior to himself, and quarrelsome. He could put nothing in a way that was ...”

“... not have been tolerated in commercial travellers. Evelyn Waugh, in the company of ‘the tomboy Rebecca West’, is perhaps unaware that his Decline and Fall is a chained book in the lavatory. Poets of the day include Gerald Gould, who in a forgotten sonnet urged his contemporaries ‘For God’s sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it.’ Humbert Wolfe ...”

“... is fair-minded enough to surround her with women who really did make their careers on their own: Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, Natalie Barney and Zelda’s Montgomery classmate and friend Sara Haardt, who fled belle-dom to write fiction; the serious and tubercular Sara eventually married H.L. Mencken and died shortly afterwards. These women were more or ...”

“... has also taken the trouble to visit many of the places she discusses – in Britain, Japan, West Germany and the United States – and her comparative approach often clarifies what is distinctive about the peace movement in particular national cultures: millenarian tendencies in America, for instance, or anti-Nazi complications in Germany. Hiroshima’s ...”

“... a best-seller, instead of an academic “doubtsell”.’ In this he was disappointed, but Dame Rebecca West allowed him to see a letter from G.B. Stern, recalling how May Sinclair had told them, in her ‘neat, precise little voice’, that Charlotte Mew had chased her upstairs into her bedroom, ‘and I assure you, Peter, and I assure you, ...”

“... eyes. ‘Once every hundred years.’ In a review of ‘The Garden Party’ and Other Stories, Rebecca West wrote that Mansfield’s ‘inventions’, as she oddly called them, had ‘lived so long in her mind that she knows all about them and can ransack them for the difficult, rare, essential points’. What Mansfield had learned how to ransack was ...”

“... heart of Victorian family and social life. When Flush was published in 1933, feminist reviewers (Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay among them) immediately drew parallels between the spaniel and Elizabeth Barrett, seeing his story as her psychological biography: she is petted and confined like him, always subject to the will of others. Flush marks the ...”

“... Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca West). The manuscript’s progress through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this ...”

“... to think that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family might be embarrassed by his ...”

“... and Tide, her journalism published everywhere, exciting new friendships with Margaret Rhondda, Rebecca West, E.M. Delafield, Stella Benson and Storm Jameson and all the other attributes that Phyllis Bentley had found so desirable, including Bentley herself. Active, outspoken, energetic, her tall figure slightly stooped but her glance just as ...”

“... one strand. Along the way, Harriet Weaver, a socialist feminist, became the editor, assisted by Rebecca West, who told Marsden: ‘I don’t see why a movement towards freedom of expression in literature should not be associated with your gospel. Tell me, did you ever try to get any short stories or literary essays?’ Soon afterwards, ...”

“... kind of left-wing ideology, from anarchism to syndicalism; others turned against Europe and the West in a search for an as yet undiscovered foundation for a new global order, less tainted by the recent bloodletting masquerading as ‘civilisation’. After 1919, many right-leaning Japanese and Chinese intellectuals and politicians adopted a Japanese-led ...”

“... only three days, he escaped from a lawyer’s office in New Brunswick at the age of 17 and headed west to Calgary, where he ran a bowling alley. There, in Williams’s words, he learned ‘knowledge of how a grandee looked and behaved, and more to the immediate point, of the advantages of insider information as a sure way of making money’. Soon he was ...”

“... The supply of stories has perhaps been the American West’s only reliable bounty. The difficult thing has been finding people to notice them, let alone tell them well. The Indian wars, still unfinished as tribes continue to struggle for rights, territory and cultural survival; the resource rushes, the Gold Rush in particular, which turned San Francisco into a cosmopolitan city standing alone in the wilderness; the once astonishingly abundant salmon runs that sustained soil and trees, as well as birds, bears and humans; the timber wars; the rangeland wars; the radical labour and environmental movements; the attitudes people adopted towards a harsh, unfamiliar, often sublime landscape; the evolution of European cultures in a non-European terrain and the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants to shape a hybrid culture: all these have had their occasional historians, though most Americans were raised to believe that history happened somewhere else ...”