Nicola Beauman

In the same year that her mother died, 1928, MK gave birth to her first child, Julia , who also became a novelist. Another daughter and a son followed in 1930 and 1935. Kennedy and...

Henry Whipple, who worked as a civil servant in education, was Dorothy's boss at the time. His work took them to conferences here and there, and meetings of the W. E .A.Nicola Beauman

LCA 's mother, Mary , Lady Wemyss, was born a Wyndham, a descendent of the writer Félicité, Mme de Genlis , and of her royal lover Philippe Egalité , Duc d'Orléans (who was also father...

Having joined the army, Herbert Asquith had a spell at a training camp on Salisbury Plain before being posted to the Front in France. By August 1916 he was feeling as if he would...

Without children of his own, Barrie had a habit of monopolising the children of friends, for whom he invented elaborate games. Among children so situated were Bevil Quiller-Couch (who was later the fiancé of the...

At that time the Foreign Office, working in London, was distinct from the Diplomatic Service , working abroad. It was not until after the First World War that Owen O'Malley became a diplomat overseas. He...

MPD married future businessman Clare Robinson , whom she had met the year before when he was still an undergraduate.

Nicola Beauman sees the letters as a tribute to the behaviour of ordinary people in times of nightmare stress.

A British Foreign Office official warned that what he called the uniform unpleasantness of the Spanish characters (which was news to her: was he responding to the fact that people behave badly in extreme circumstances?)...

On the publication of London War NotesNoël Coward wrote to tell MPD that her evocation of the city in wartime, nearly thirty years in the past, was so well done that he felt sodden...

MPD , who disparaged her own powers of invention and ear for dialogue, called this her only novel.Nicola Beauman thought it a study in the shifting sands of social class, and a hymn...

Nicola Beauman judges this one of EMD 's best novels.

Nicola Beauman judges that EMD succeeds in speaking to two different kinds of readers here: those who share the heroine's views of marriage and those who recognize the element of satire in them.Maurice McCullen

The novel was criticised by some for its exclusively upper-middle-class reach—a view which was energetically countered by Rose Macaulay on a radio programme.The Times Literary Supplement welcomed with joy a novel where the...

Critic Nicola Beauman sees this as EMD 's most cruelly satirical novel.