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“... At the age of 86 and with a broken hip, the Marchesa Casa-Maury was interviewed by Caroline Blackwood for her book about the last dreadful days – months, years rather – of the Duchess of Windsor. The Marchesa had been the Duke’s mistress for fifteen years when Wallis Simpson arrived on the scene. Blackwood explained to the old lady how the Duchess was being sequestered in Paris by her lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, who was obsessed with her, and that she was officiously being kept alive, although rumoured to be comatose, to have turned black and to have shrivelled to the size of a doll ...”

“... Eastwick through the potency of John Updike’s imaginative release. On the Perimeter records what Caroline Blackwood found at Greenham Common and in the town of Newbury, when she visited the nuclear protest encampments there in March this year, shortly before the town council attempted to evict the women for good. One of the incidents ...”

“... more drastically than Mary Queen of Scots, or Joan of Arc, or even Margaret Thatcher, then perhaps Caroline Blackwood’s recycled revelations about the Duchess – her expertise at fellatio, her 22 carat gold bath-tub at Cap d’Antibes, the amusing tricks that her homosexual lover, the Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, liked to perform with his penis at ...”

“... Few authors in recent fiction have addressed themselves to the universal family romance with Caroline Blackwood’s bleakness. In her previous novels, The Stepdaughter and Great Granny Webster, the outlines of parental tyranny, of domination and resistance, were memorably etched. Mum and Dad could fuck you up in the simplest of ways – by simply ...”

“... didn’t hog all the paper and pencils. Connolly, his former wife reports, was keen on the young Caroline Blackwood, though Ian Fleming said, in his ‘blokey’ way, that she needed ‘a damned good scrub’, and Quennell lamented the state of her fingernails. Ms Blackwood, who, both in her novels and in her ...”

“... him.) Suspicion, once sown, is hard to uproot. Beverly Treasure? Chelsea Herbert? Lloriston Grant? Caroline Blackwood and Robert Lowell have a conversation about Ford Madox Ford? (Well, all right, but what’s it doing among ‘Traveller’s Tales’?)Chelsea Herbert is real too, and writes the best piece in the ‘Children in the City’ section: a ...”

“... three times: to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1949 to 1972 and to Caroline Blackwood from 1972 to his death in 1977. With Hardwick he had a daughter, Harriet, and with Blackwood a son, Sheridan; he was also stepfather to Blackwood’s three ...”

“... and confinement: the chill Hotel Bedroom in which the painter stands silhouetted above his wife (Caroline Blackwood at that time) on the bed; the bleak room in Paddington where Harry Diamond stands truculently in his mac by the window. One knows the rooms which have served as studios both from the landmarks that reappear in picture after picture (the ...”

“... attitude here is well matched by the cold intimacy of Freud’s portraits of Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood. But in other respects these crisp early Freuds seem the antithesis of the postwar style. Girl in a Green Dress (1954), a painting of Blackwood, details every lash, every freckle on her face. Within a ...”

“... the way his stomach protruded, Freud ‘thought I’d better emphasise it more’. Freud​ met Caroline Blackwood at a party in 1949 when she was 18. Three years later, he painted her portrait. Just as John Minton had commented when Freud painted him, Caroline, of whom Freud did a series of portraits, remembered ...”

“... arrived in England he went to a party given by Faber, his publishers. Among the other guests was Caroline Blackwood, 38 at the time and the mother of three daughters. Blackwood told Lowell’s biographer, Ian Hamilton, that after the party Lowell moved into her London house – ‘I mean instantly, that night.’On 27 ...”

“... also give biographers an excuse for connecting the childhood to the work. Sinclair reports that Caroline Blackwood was told ‘by a homosexual friend of Bacon’s that he had admitted to being systematically and viciously horsewhipped by the Irish grooms in front of the father he feared and loved’. Peppiatt, who uses the same source, writes: ‘If ...”

“... too much housework, too little money, too little space, and besides, Connolly developed a crush on Caroline Blackwood and wasn’t particularly nice to Skelton when she came out of hospital after an unsuccessful operation to enable her to conceive. Coatis and Abyssinian cats took the place of the children she couldn’t have and were much dreaded by ...”

“... letters written to Lowell by Elizabeth Hardwick, his wife of many years, after he left her for Caroline Blackwood, Bishop could not contain herself. In some of the sonnets, Hardwick’s letters were in quotation marks: ‘I love you, Darling, there’s a black black void, as black as night without you. I long to see your face or hear your voice, and ...”

“... from Lowell’s The Dolphin (1973), which uses her letters to him after he left her for Caroline Blackwood in 1970, and now from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick’s own experience of loving, living with, and being left by a great writer. But, as she says of Jane Carlyle, ‘the tone of her letters is guarded and her ...”