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“... It is as well to establish at the outset what Madame duDeffand was not. She was not, whatever the publisher of Benedetta Craveri’s book may claim, a woman who ‘approached love and sex with a frankness centuries ahead of her time’: her time was the 18th-century Regency, which took a casual view of fidelity, and the hedonistic age of Louis XV ...”

“... is not one of those whose communications one reads for their own sakes, as one does the letters of Madame de Sevigné, Madame duDeffand, Edward Fitzgerald – or indeed of William Cowper, the new edition of whose Letters and Prose Writings has just reached its fourth volume. Yet ...”

“... first volume appeared. Be that as it may, the letters are not an accidental growth, like those of Madame de Sevigné, Madame duDeffand, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Edward FitzGerald or indeed the great Swift himself. They bear the same relationship to such products as do those ...”