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“... In her introduction to Antonia White’s Diaries the editor, her elder daughter Susan Chitty, quite naturally raises the question of whether or not they should have been published at all. But such doubts as she may have had, and conquered, have apparently nothing to do with the amount of coverage her mother’s life needs or justifies ...”

“... Antonia White died eight years ago aged 81. In the past three years, two biographies or memoirs of her have been published, each by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art ...”

“... memorable? Clearly, we want to know quite badly, if the plethora of biographical material on Antonia White is anything to go by. Since her death, squabbles and law suits have busied her offspring, and trees by the dozen have been felled in the cause of discovering the real Antonia White. The second volume of ...”

“... Antonia White died in 1980 leaving behind four novels, over thirty translations (mainly Colette), two books about cats, some stories and a piece of autobiography. She also left two daughters (Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson) and more than a million words of diaries – work that some consider her greatest achievement, and the editing of which led to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was ...”

“... would probably rather have made his mark as a writer than as an editor. His first wife was Antonia White, and he desbribes how they would ‘sit for as many hours as we could allow or keep awake at our two desks. What I was writing was a novel – unpublished and happily never to be published – about a young man who gets involved in advertising ...”

“... 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 had truly been forgotten: on ...”

“... the disjunction between appearance and reality? I suppose somewhere deep in the forests where no white man has trod; in the highest, most inaccessible plateaux of some far-flung mountainous region, there might be a few primitive folk left who still think that what they see is what there is. But the rest of us are not completely astonished to discover that ...”

“... was six, she was sent, as if to complete the gothic theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a ...”

“... you borrow Emily’s Wordsworth you will not read Wordsworth but Emily’s Wordsworth,’ Antonia White said. ‘She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she flings herself upon and passionately possesses a work.’ Wesley described Coleman as ‘larger than life, her enthusiasm boundless, her laughter a marvel, her ...”

“... In her first line, Antonia Fraser describes her book as ‘a labour of love’. Given her somewhat romantic view of Charles II’s many affairs of the heart and her warm sympathy for the King, it is a doubly apt admission. The book is much more, however, than an account written around the royal harem. It is a portrait drawn from the absorption of many sources ...”

“... Hugh Fraser (‘tall’, ‘lopsided’, with an ‘aura of helpless authority’) and his wife Antonia, whose charms and ‘sexiness’ are unstintingly acknowledged. Then a couple from New Zealand arrive: Malcolm, an academic who looked after Naipaul on a recent lecture tour to the country, and Robin, his wife, ‘wearing a soft, unnecessary hat, as New ...”

“... an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child. I quote this, not to ...”

“... prairie life that made her famous – O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925) among them – it was exactly this quality of noble withholding that she sought to achieve. Cather’s preference may have been shaped by emotional identification. Unlike ...”

“... it seemed that the new ideal could be found in art, another pioneering pastoral followed, My Antonia, finding value in the past as the present went to war. The ideal, much modified by inside and outside forces, may be kept going, it seems, by those who, like Antonia, make the best of things. As in the previous ...”

“... Park, Moscow and the sables let loose in the snow on Staten Island at the end – ‘black on white, black on white, and then gone’ – there are connections of cause and effect such as few crime novels have ever had to cope with. Gorky Park is a long novel because it tries to deal as fully with Moscow as Simenon’s ...”