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“... apiece is not surprising; nor that they should remember their birthdays. In Scott of the Antarctic Elspeth Huxley noted that Dr Edward Wilson’s 39th occurred during a side-trip to study the emperor penguins: ‘quite the funniest birthday I have ever spent’. In the novel, when Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans mentions his birthday in an attempt at ...”

“... strange crops and a variety of poultry. In the evenings, she wrote letters to her daughter Elspeth Huxley in England. These shrewd, funny, very touching letters, sometimes gossipy, sometimes wry, form the bulk of Nellie: Letters from Africa and span 40 years, taking in the Mau Mau raids alongside all the minutiae of a dogged and staunch lady who ...”

“... is no difference between the works of Shiva Naipaul and the literature of Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley. They all degrade Africans.’ Another, a distinguished Kenya novelist, ‘places Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen (that old feudalist!) in the tradition of “great racists like Hume, Trollope, Hegel ...”

“... pink dust-jacket of The Prince buys the Manor to realise that there is a factual basis for Elspeth Huxley’s ‘extravaganza’. There, nestling in the wooded Cotswolds, is the familiar facade of the rather ordinary country house which has recently been dignified by the arrival of A Royal Personage. The gossip columns of the evening papers have ...”

“... In Writers and Politics Ngugi is scathing about the narrowness of such well-known writers as Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen whom he places in ‘the tradition of great racists like Hume, Trollope, Hegel and Trevor-Roper, all arch-priests of privilege, racism and class snobbery’. It is the violence of such sentiments that has caused some people to ...”

“... leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not been there to steady ...”

“... younger, was the sister of Mary Arnold, Mrs Humphry Ward. Another sister was married to Leonard Huxley, son of Thomas, so Leonard’s sons, Aldous and the zoologist Julian Huxley, were Geoffrey’s cousins. When Gordon launched a fighting fund to pay for his sister-in-law’s legal expenses, Julian ...”

“... and without the servant problem’. Tidrick disposes ably of the pseudo-liberal fantasies of Elspeth Huxley, whose books still hold their own in print, though she excuses European seizure of the Kenyan Highlands on the grounds that whites ‘instinctively’ select cooler country and ‘make for the mountain tops’, whereas ‘natives, on the ...”

“... begins not with Todd, or her temporary replacement, Miss Anderson, but with the wonderfully named Elspeth Champcommunal, who took over in time for the 1916 Christmas edition, informing readers that ‘the Parisienne’s day is not complete unless she wears the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more fashion-conscious than Todd; she knew people like Paul ...”