Georgina Morley

she didn't really see the point because it was sort of better the devil she knew.

But that's because she started when she was 60 and she had spent her adult life

teaching great books to recalcitrant children.

But it's also because she was broke.

But it's the difficulty in the books.

It's that surface lightness.

It's that, you know, very English comedy of manners in which people visibly fail.

in a visibly painful but not too unkind a way, which is terribly, terribly English.

And yet the sensibility and the astringency and the richness of the inner workings are European.

I feel like I'm back in class with Mrs Fitzgerald and trying to impress her.

Oh, that is so good.

But it's like one of the things I read doing my homework, because I'm still Mrs Fitzgerald's A-level student.

I'll stop doing that soon.

Was a review of the Hermione Lee biography by A.N.

Wilson.

Yes.

And he says of her nine novels, only three are pure gold at Freddy's, The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower.

Human Voices about the BBC during the war nearly hits the mark and is always enjoyable to reread.

And then this is the bit that made me want to kill him.

The other works of fiction have amateur charm, but they read like novellas written by an old lady for other old ladies, and if they were the only thing she had written, it is unlikely that their author would have become the subject of a substantial biography by the former goldsmith's professor of English literature at Oxford.