Hilary Spurling

The family idea about Bishop Burnet was only one aspect of ICB 's father's creation of a background for himself which did not match the facts. Ivy grew up in the belief that her forebears...

Veronal had first been prescribed for Topsy's toothache. The secretive habits of all the sisters meant that no-one noticed that Topsy and Primrose had not in actuality been away for a two-week visit which they...

ICB 's two youngest sisters committed suicide together by an overdose of veronal, to which they had both become secretly addicted.

Though missionaries in particular complained that both these portraits were distorted, in 1970s and 1980s China they were admired for complicating and nuancing the official, blanket vilification of missionaries that had obtained during Mao's lifetime....

Spurling described Fighting Angel as Buck's brief, unsparing, beautifully balanced biography of her father .

Spurling calls this plea for truth-telling on the topic of mental illness at once passionate and marvellously dispassionate.

Many reviewers greeted this as one of her best books, and for a while it revived her waning reputation.Spurling said she uses her intensely creative faculty of memory to paint a clear...

Spurling calls the plot absurdly unrealistic, yet acknowledges that its stylized symbolism works.

The Three Daughters of Madame Liang was chosen by the Book of the Month Club and by the Readers Digest (for a condensed version). Spurling located the value of this book and Letter from Peking...

The Good Earth was a Book of the Month Club choice, on the recommendation of Dorothy Canfield Fisher , who had sat up all night reading it. It won the Pulitzer Prize, headed...

The title reflects the situation of ICB 's generation, in which so many men had been killed in the first World War. The story is set in a large girls' school in a prosperous English...

She had just finished drafting her highly original memoir of her mother, but for placing in print she chose something more conventional: a description of life in Anhui from the point of view of a...

Hilary Spurling calls this text, a favourite of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party , a hugely popular saga of resistance against a corrupt and unjust government by a band of thirteenth-century outlaws.

Hilary Spurling maintains that PSB put a good deal of her own personality into her portrait of the self-educated outsider who became a powerful woman and a reformer. (It was Tz'u Hsi who abolished...

This book belongs, says Hilary Spurling , to the burst of autobiographical writing (including the lives of her parents and the novels The Time is Noon, and Other Gods) that followed Buck's final...