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“... were not foreign to her life, and Charlotte Mew has come to be cherished as ‘neglected’. Penelope Fitzgerald makes it clear that she doesn’t think this means Mew has to be considered a genius, and that the disregard she has suffered was not due to lack of support in her lifetime. She has written a good book about her: one which is firm, sometimes ...”

“... this is worthy of investigation. On the surface, Humphrey Morrison has just tried to write a lively historical novel about intrigue and rivalry at a Swabian university in the Early Modern period. Acknowledgment is generously offered to one of the author’s history teachers, Professor Walter Ullman of Cambridge, ‘who inspired in me a fascination for ...”

“... circle. It was in the negotiable territory between them that careers like theirs could flourish. Penelope Hughes-Hallett is not much concerned to offer new information about the evening or the protagonists, though she has some about Joseph Ritchie, a young explorer, who was there too. Rather she pursues, with warmth and energy, the various currents of ideas ...”

“... Fleece, a selection of essays, reviews and reminiscences put together on her instructions by Penelope Jardine, her assistant, friend, housemate and literary executor. The publishing history alone tells a story of unblushing professionalism: the earliest piece was written in 1948 for Argentor, the house journal of the National ...”

“... puzzle of their unevenness. Of course, one appreciates what is good: the precise observations, the lively metaphors, the occasional droll jokes, and those passages, some of them amounting to entire poems, where a genuine experience of the world is faithfully transmitted. But this is a small part of a large output, and against it stands much that is dismayingly ...”

“... in Africa, and a son from whom she was often separated. London in wartime and after meant a lively struggle to exist, and to make a career as a writer. A breakdown and conversion to Roman Catholicism changed everything, and gave rise to a remarkable first novel, The Comforters, which won generous praise from Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.Certain of her ...”

“... in this respect with the pre-Portnoy, and much more reserved, My friend says it’s bulletproof by Penelope Mortimer. But Tit for Tat has none of Roth’s or Jong’s jollity – the secrets are dirtier and much more frightening. Bargate’s narrative tone is traumatised and post-operative. What literary flourishes she offers are flattened by the awful ...”

“... overworks – and not much else. His presentation of the homosexuals, on the other hand, is lively and explicit. He refers to a respected member of the teaching staff as ‘an inveterate cottager’, and recounts how he arranged for Anthony Blunt, who was giving a lecture tour for the Council in Greece, to meet and assess young men (‘That one’s ...”

“... in particular, feature ‘a poetics of the body’. In a letter of 1921, Joyce told Frank Budgen: Penelope is the clou of the book ... It begins and ends with the female word yes. It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words ...”

“... is brimming over with accounts of visits with and from lots of important and interesting people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful ...”

“... success made Francis Oliphant ‘an idle and aimless man’. Most strikingly, her two sons, lively and talented in their teens, dwindled into charmless wastrels. A.C. Benson, who was at school with them, charted the decline of Cyril Oliphant from a ‘vivid and sparkling Eton-boy’ to an ‘elderly and deprecating loafer’; his younger brother was ...”

“... In the decades after the Second World War, another supremely accomplished mime artist with a lively sense of the possibilities of film emerged as a plausible successor to the Tramp. Jacques Tati, born in 1907 and raised in one of Paris’s grandest suburbs, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, had by then broken sufficiently with family tradition to establish himself ...”

“... the Manor Born offered a replay of old Tory values in an era of new Whiggism calling itself Tory. Penelope Keith’s character rejoiced in both assurance and widowhood. Yet she was merely a charming eccentric at bottom, one of those comic ladies, like Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple; Keith’s character, like that of Addison’s Sir Roger de ...”