A joy to read

Colegate’s novels offer readers clear-eyed, illuminating windows onto this now bygone world … Colegate has no equal … In shining a light on the past, Colegate also illuminates the present

With impeccable timing, Bloomsbury have republished, in a single volume, Isabel Colegate’s Orlando trilogy … When I read them as a teenager I had only the thinnest understanding of the rise of fascism or the work of Sophocles and no idea how extraordinary Colegate’s achievement was.

It will be intriguing to reclaim a writer who was esteemed in the 1980s but who has largely fallen out of print

Colegate’s sharp-eyed trilogy about a young man on the make in 1930s London feels particularly resonant right now, given its acute take on male privilege and power

Miss Colegate has before proved herself not only precise in her evocation of periods but also gifted with that sympathy that makes hindsight genuinely more rewarding than topical observation … There is hardly a sentence to fault, or a snatch of dialogue to improve on

She should be a household name

It makes a direct impact because it is a succession of clear pictures or striking statements; it has sharply outlined characters, definite situations, dramatic pauses; and its story line leads through a tangle of incidents to a climax that has the weight of inevitability

Colegate’s instinctive feel for the values and obsessions of the upper echelons of English, society is heightened by the ironic distance she inserts between herself and her conservative yet eccentric cast of characters, the end result has the unstoppable momentum of an upper crust potboiler

Colegate’s prose is flowing and unpretentious. She tells an excellent tale

Combine the slightly offbeat sensibility of Muriel Spark with the milieu of an Iris Murdoch novel and you’ll have something of an idea about this witty tale

Subtle and graceful … Miss Colegate is beautifully precise and invests that sticky feverish time with just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair

She writes so gracefully and with such skill that her “private fable” acquires a truly fabulous quality

Miss Colegate has found a perfect metaphor for the passing of a way of life

Poised, wry, lovable, informative … An utterly complete rendering of a way of life

A beautifully crafted novel, remarkably visual and evocative. The characters are caught in stunning images and tableaux that convey the essence of their natures, the sweep of their emotions

A lovely piece of writing, in which subtlety, irony, and close observation abound

Stylish, funny, as vivid and brilliant as a painting on glass

Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry … I have seldom enjoyed a book so much

Remarkable … I can think of no work of fiction that brings [this period] to life so fully and subtly

‘Isabel Colegate is not afraid of ideas nor of using fiction to express them … In this rich and fascinating book, someone is hiding something – possibly everyone is. Time itself obscures the truth. Can the past be known? Or is what we call history the best of recollection, not absolute but consensual, and always subject to interpretation?

A sonorous and muted masterpiece