{weekend words}

"And there was also of course Rebecca West, whom [H. G. Wells] called his 'panther', and by whom he had a son (whose middle name was Panther) in 1914. West was particularly critical of his writing about sex: 'His prose,' she wrote, 'suddenly loses its firmness and begins to shake like blancmange.' She had a tendency to associate Edwardian male writers with jellied substances: she described being kissed by Ford Madox Ford as 'like being the toast under a poached egg.'

Colin Burrow 'Big Head, Many Brains' 

[Review of David Lodge's A Man of Parts]

London Review of Books 16/6/2011 [vol.33, no.12] p.19