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“... Rose Macaulay loved semantics and her most precious possession was her 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary: ‘my bible, my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure,’ she wrote to Victor and Ruth Gollancz in a rare display of feeling, after they had replaced the copy destroyed with the rest of Macaulay’s flat during the Blitz ...”

“... Abroad … is it worth the trouble of getting there?’ So begins Rose Macaulay’s alphabetical journey through the mixed pleasures of existence. First published in 1935, this reissue comes at a moment when Abroad is once again hedged about with difficulty. The bureaucratic obstacles ‘that crouch and snarl before you’ like dragons no longer include traveller’s cheques, and reservations are much simpler with the internet, but PCR tests and passenger locator forms demand the same combination of ‘industry, negligence and guile’ which Macaulay advises the tourist to deploy in order to get across the Channel ...”

“... on top of marriage. Marry me, Alice, marry my secrets, Sight unseen, and marry Glasgow and Rose Macaulay and the snell east wind. I’ll marry you and Iona and has-been, Shall-be firths of slipways and dwammy kyles. I do, you did, we’ll do, hitched to every last Drop of our wedding-day showers, Downpours, reflecting us over and over, So we’ll ...”

“... by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald ‘introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the Partisan Review and founder of his own journal Politics: she stared at him and said, “Have you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind.” ’ ‘American-style’ may be a hint that ...”

“... in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for the place of honour. Between these three women enough power should have been generated even for an impossible cause. They were tireless collectors of facts – Rose used to take her newspaper-cuttings ...”

“... the vicar of Esher). May notes two milestones in the paper’s steady modernising: a review by Rose Macaulay (‘later Dame Rose Macaulay’, as May bowingly nudges us) of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Manservant and Maidservant in 1947, the first time that a new English novel had been given a full page piece to ...”

“... the High Victorians who scraped away the ivy and invented ‘archaeology’. In the 20th century Rose Macaulay wondered whether, after the horror of total war, any artist could ever again get pleasure from the sight of destruction. The evidence of Ruin Lust suggests that artists have lost some confidence, if not interest, in the subject. Keith ...”

“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... on the experiences of six novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to Lehmann: ‘Everything is breaking up.’ Amid the physical and emotional ...”

“... of socialist youth was probably all a mirage. Sir Woodrow ends his book with a quotation from Rose Macaulay, who apparently told him (at a publisher’s party, needless to say) that ‘she felt the same enthusiasms and had the same attitudes at 70 as when she was 18: merely the body had changed.’ ‘The same with me,’ concludes the shameless ...”

“... sides in the war – refugees, politicians, gamblers, aristos. It was two months before this that Rose Macaulay had visited Lisbon for the Spectator (a result, no doubt, of our new, cuddly relationship with the Azores-owners). At a cosmopolitan dinner party, she wrote, the Portuguese host would tell the servants: ‘The English are coming; we must put ...”

“... been out of print and in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike). Rose Macaulay, for example, oozed – anonymously – in the TLS: ‘an altogether delightful book … an enchanting cast of characters, all set forth with a kind of gay, insouciant wit … the humour is infectious, the figures endearingly ridiculous and ...”

“... seems to have any interests – not literature or art or politics or themselves. They are, as Rose Macaulay astutely noted, ‘amiable nitwits’, and some of them aren’t that amiable. You can see the force in Bradbury’s remark that Waugh’s novels of this period are in a way ‘anti-novels’, their mode defined by a deliberate refusal to ...”

“... and theatre clubs, Surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry’ were among the things Rose Macaulay singled out as characterising the ‘decorative, intelligent, extravagant’ 1920s. In 1919 the Women’s Engineering Society was founded and Nancy Astor became the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. A year later Oxford ...”

“... enough to grasp this too; she draws apt attention to the Bowen syndrome (also evident in Rose Macaulay) of being infinitely sociable and at the same time infinitely solitary. Bowen said that writing novels was a way of working off ‘the sense of being solitary and farouche’. By writing she became ‘relatable’. If one were ‘house-trained ...”