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“... Shirley​ Hazzard was born in 1931 in Australia, the daughter of immigrants from Scotland and Wales. Both her parents, it’s said, were involved in the construction of Sydney Harbour Bridge. She went on to live on three other continents: Asia, Europe and North America. As is sometimes the way with writers whose biographies are yet to be written (Brigitta Olubas is on the case), information about Hazzard’s life is often tinged with exoticism ...”

“... Shirley Hazzard​ liked to tell the story of how she got to know Graham Greene. A rainy morning in the late 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will hold your hand but as long as all may –And then, according to Hazzard, Greenecould not remember the very end ...”

“... endlessly fascinating differences among national languages. ‘The thing had been attempted,’ Shirley Hazzard writes in The Proust Project, ‘it had been done. It was incontrovertibly there . . . if it is to be challenged, it cannot merely be “redone”; it must be conspicuously bettered.’ ‘The thing’ is Scott Moncrieff’s translation of ...”

“... And in an island the old car Lingered from inn to inn, Like a fly on a map. Like The Third Woman, Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri contains much that isn’t actually about Greene, but they have little else in common. Hazzard’s memoir is elegant and affectionate, if occasionally dull, and its amiable charm is ...”

“... Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Shirley Hazzard, Doris Lessing and many other women writers are here (but not Anne Frank or Hannah Arendt), and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet women, collected, Studs Terkel-wise, by Julia Voznesenskaya. The reaction to ...”

“... Of the staff and siting of the UN in New York, the description of the Australian writer Shirley Hazzard, who worked for a decade inside it, and has left us the best account of the atmosphere of its early years, still stands: Americans were not – and have never been – ‘internationalised’ in the United Nations Secretariat. Living on ...”