Victoria Glendinning

"Glendinning's biography is unusual in including almost as much about Raffles's relatives and friends as about him. This is as it should be, as they were crucial to his career as well as to his happiness; especially his two wives, the vivacious , who died in 1814, and then the strong and resourceful , who bore him his children, and fanned his reputation, and her own, after Raffles's death."

"It was the patrician in Vita that first fascinated Mrs Woolf. The aristocratic manner, she noted, was like an actress's ..."

"and , the principal family historians, both wrote that it was Mr Trollope's idea that should go to America. They may have been fudging the real issues here, just as they fudged the long association of Mrs Trollope with ."

"In 1920, , Edith, and Helen Rootham instituted the Anglo-French Poetry Society, largely as a platform for Mrs. Bennett's recitations."

"With his wife, he founded the . He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After came change and a . In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels."

"The letters to are Bowen's "writing" in the same way as her books and stories are. Readers of her fiction will find echoes and resonances. She told him with great freedom about how she writes, when she writes, what it feels like to be writing. When, late in life, she started on The Little Girls, she shared the process of creation with him as never before — even though The Heat of the Day, about love and betrayal in London during the war, is dedicated "To Charles Ritchie". If these were only love-letters, they would not be so valuable or extraordinary. Bowen is a natural and practised story-teller with a genius for evoking atmosphere. She can be wonderfully funny as well as deadly serious as she regales Ritchie with the minutiae of her life, whether in Ireland, England, Europe or America. She spills out, without inhibition, her opinions and prejudices."

"He cannot be seen as an Enlightenment figure. What we think of as eighteenth-century, in terms of architecture, furniture, painting and the decorative arts, came mostly after his heyday. He died in 1745 and was isolated by deafness and dementia from the late 1730s."