What each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude
Sunday Telegraph
A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction
Observer
Surely the definitive biography.
- Harold Acton,
Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience
- Fiona McCarthy, The Times
It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb
- Dervla Murphy, Irish Times
Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be
Country Life
Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West
Guardian