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“... progress. To the Land of the Reeds is built around a journey with its illusion of progress: Daphne Merkin’s first novel, Enchantment, has the obsessively circular and cyclical quality of a bad dream. The story is little more than an accumulation of episodes in which Hannah Lehmann, a contemporary New Yorker in her mid-twenties, picks away at the ...”

“... itself deep inside the American psyche’. Writing more favourably in the Times Book Review, Daphne Merkin called Secret Life ‘an extraordinarily absorbing and disquieting memoir’. It is between these two poles of censoriousness and uneasy empathy that most readers will shuttle as they attempt to resolve their own feelings about what ...”

“... Robins herself says: ‘Diana was serious in her use of psychoanalytic jargon.’ The writer Daphne Merkin remarks that ‘if there ever was someone who was literal about psychoanalytic concepts, it was Diana … Metaphor would get lost.’ But the people cited in this work – friends and associates, ex-friends, children, students, enemies – all ...”

“... from a New York Times review of Hermione Lee’s 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf. In the midst of Daphne Merkin’s somewhat dutiful praise there erupts a moment of real excitement: Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as Ms Lee’s, makes fascinating use of documents that are either unfamiliar or ...”