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“... This is a collection of 14 stories by Mary Butts, a dedicated and prolific writer who died comparatively young in the Thirties. She is one of the current victims of the fashionable drive to exhume ‘forgotten women writers’. The category is dreary. Mary Butts is not ...”

“... For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance promises an occasion to assay the limits of the canon, for Butts’s second novel, Armed with Madness, first published in 1928, is, I would say, a masterpiece of Modernist prose ...”

“... the neo-paganism of Llewellyn Powys (brother of John Cowper), the symbolist nostalgia of Mary Butts, the Marxist version of village life offered by lesbians Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Luddite organicism of Rolf Gardiner and the yeoman-patriotic creed of Sir Arthur Bryant (both the latter having shady pro-Nazi ...”

“... State University, he encountered Conrad Aitken’s Modern Anthology of Poetry, and took up with Mary Colby, the pair henceforth inseparable. He was suspended and she was expelled by the university after they spent the night out together, so they married and hitchhiked around America, with Oppen drafting poems on the road. In New York in 1928 they met Louis ...”

“... to pursue his career and becomes instead a collector of china and stones. The British novelist Mary Butts harboured a life-long obsession with pebbles and stones: ‘The life, the potency that lives in the kind of earth-stuff that is hard and coloured and cold. Yet is alive and full of secrets, with a sap and a pulse and a being all to itself.’ Film ...”

“... round a hat that once belonged to him after she does her strip. The scarlet-haired opium addict, Mary Butts, makes a brief guest appearance and Sinclair borrows a minatory quotation from her autobiography: ‘I heard the first wraths of the guns at the Thames’s mouth below Tilbury.’ With this mass of literary references, the sex magic, the ...”

“... contents, their history, their value, or their associations. My Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford or Mary Butts collections, 1930s stuff (though I sold my complete set of the Left Book Club many years ago), first editions by prewar writers, rarities, oddities, and books of poems given to me by their authors.Rose Macaulay lost all her books, along with the ...”

“... Isadora Duncan wanders around barefoot looking for sailors, a basket of lobsters in her arms; Mary Butts is writing her books in a room upstairs; Cocteau moulds figurines of wax and pipe-cleaners in a room full of opium smoke. An American passing through wonders, innocently, at the smell that fills the hallways. Once Cocteau’s relationship with ...”

“... observed behaviourist rants (trashing the proles), small revenges. The Modernist experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations ...”

“... girl and the two foreigners who weren’t princesses.’ Mother Bridget, the headmistress of St Mary’s, Ascot, greeted some new-starters in 1976 by saying: ‘Now, hands up any of you whose house is open to the public.’The teachers could be extraordinary, mainly in the sense of not being ordinary. They were almost always women. ‘My ears pricked up ...”

“... be used for healing. Crowds began gathering very quickly indeed, and miracles followed. The Virgin Mary had been declared immaculate in 1854, four years before Bernadette’s vision confirmed to her, in her local Pyrenean dialect: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’ The doctrine holds that Mary was conceived in the mind of ...”

“... for adults, but child readers, both boys and girls, took over and the author had to go easy with butts like the Society of Ancient Souls and the Society for the Encouragement of Higher Thought (the Twenties spawned endless cults, from Couéism to Eurhythmics). Some truly excruciating literary poseurs arrive to stay in William’s village, among them a writer ...”

“... with little jokes at the expense of some public monuments: Quetelet and Durkheim have been regular butts for this tour. Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian Astronomer Royal, takes the prize for attributing to mathematical theorems reality in nature. Quetelet was dazzled by the idea of the bell-shaped curve displaying the mean of a distribution, and went ahead to ...”

“... can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of transparent Genghis Khan there, but in a very different spirit from the Classical original. The horror of mutability has gone: instead, mutability is taken to be ...”

“... table leavings, ‘heated, clarified, and strained to get out all the breadcrumbs and cigarette butts’. (Do they really still smoke in Manhattan?) Perhaps most alarming for a nation of lipophobes are the quantities of butter, tons of lovely, artery-clogging butter everywhere: it’s what makes the food taste so good. As with the fishes, so with the ...”