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“... or memoirs – depends on what someone has to remember and the terms in which they do so. Frances Partridge was born in 1901: she spans the century – a rich enough field, one would think. And her previous book, A Pacifist’s War, is eminently, even compulsively readable: personal recollection is tethered to public events; the immediacy of her ...”

“... mother and stepfather, Mary and Robin Campbell, went to live in Wiltshire and were neighbours of Frances Partridge and her husband Ralph. They became great friends. I was somewhere included in that friendship, and Frances made an enormous impression on me as I grew up. These are the years covered in Everything to ...”

“... K going off to Balkans, now J falling in love with Robert Kee, who spends weekend at Ham Spray, F. Partridge approves,’ and so on. Sometimes it all seemed very distant and unimportant. And as for Frances Partridge’s approval, I think I would have gone a long way to avoid spending a weekend at Ham Spray (that ...”

“... from the desire expressed at the time by William Golding to blow up Eton College. Bloomsbury’s Frances Partridge, queen of the diary put-down, seems to have wanted to blow up television, ‘the box in the corner’. In the flat of her friend Robert Kee, a great asset to the box in the corner, she glimpsed the Tonight programme, and later ...”

“... of being a Jamesian personality in Europe and would be more likely to swoon at the sight of Frances Partridge than, say, Jimi Hendrix. We hear of lunches at Chez Victor, where Spender and Isherwood giggle at jokes ‘all about Stephen’s boyfriends in Berlin’. And with every story young David rises in his own steely estimation. Stephen asked me ...”

“... the London Library is remarkably little changed from what earlier generations knew and loved. Frances Partridge, who has been a member for seventy years, claims that ‘nothing has changed; absolutely nothing. The same smell, the same atmosphere, the same clanking noise as you walk through those long passages at the back, and you always seem to meet ...”

“... any impression of Ramsey’s life and personality. His last hours are described very movingly by Frances Partridge in her book Memories; some letters of his to his mother have been published (mainly because of the light they throw on Wittgenstein’s life in rural Austria in the mid-Twenties); and a group of his Cambridge friends contributed their ...”

“... write a foreword to the Italian edition of The Merchant of Prato. In 1923, the Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge described the 21-year-old Iris as ‘very delicate, almost like a Botticelli, with a very quick voice and a mind as quick, running from one thing to another, and alarming because so clever’. In that year she met Antonio Origo, the ...”

“... those who had any sort of fling with the deceased.’15 May. Finish reading A Pacifist’s War by Frances Partridge and start reading Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor, both books covering the same period though from different angles, foxholes at Ham Spray and foxholes at Stalingrad hardly the same. Stalingrad is unsurprisingly a bestseller, the course of the ...”

“... employing havoc as a method of education. Conversely, the marquess’s grandmother, played by Frances de la Tour, looks old enough to be Methuselah’s sister, and embodies so perfectly the dream dowager, twinkly and intelligent, that she must be (and is) up to something else. Burn Gorman brings a special gothic nastiness to his part as the evil pursuer ...”

“... brothel he frequented, where she would be told to wait in the parlour. There’s no doubt that, as Frances Bingham writes, he amply indulged Molly’s taste for ‘pursuits which were – in contemporary terms – masculine’. Indulgence had its limits, however. Robert reacted violently to the news of an affair with another pupil at a finishing school in ...”