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...

This volume contained a selection of what LCA had written during these years. Her family very nearly decided to cut, as too personal and harrowing, a passage about the grief of her sister-in-law Lady Violet (Letty) Charteris

The volume was a Book Society recommendation.Roger Fulford , reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement, situated it among a crowd of works looking back from difficult times to an easier and...

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...

Nicola Beauman in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that AB 's writing (under the pseudonym she chose for the sake of the concealment necessary for a Foreign Office wife) began with articles, poems...

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?)...

The plot centres on a married woman's love for another man. Critic Nicola Beauman finds that EMD 's satirical tone in this and other novels encourages the reader both to sympathize with and to devalue...

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

The book is dedicated to the editor and directors of Time and Tide. Its many reprints include those with introductions by Nicola Beauman and by Jilly Cooper .

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

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

After beginning her trip smoothly, Diana is surprised by a Sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan, who kidnaps and rapes her. But EMH provides a troubling confluence of passion and male aggression, carefully blurring the line between...

Marny is Carew's counterpart because of her dismal experience of marriage. His wife was unfaithful; her husband was abusive (he struck her, the whole weight of his powerful body behind the smashing blow that...