She is never boastful, but the qualities she praises in others' work shine through in her luminescent, limpid prose. Enjoyable and informative whether she is discussing Ruskin's famous reaction to his wife's pubic hair, Edith Wharton's women or Gossip Girl, she is consistently pleasurable to read. Her writing, and this is her describing again, for I could never do it half so well, has "a rare quality of cleanness-as if it came from a spring rather than from the stale pool of received ideas that most talk and writing comes from". 

The one note that jars (or, rather, the one time she takes it too far) is perhaps Malcolm's discussion of poor old Angelica Garnett, Vanessa Bell's daughter, on whom "Bloomsbury bohemianism was obviously lost," as she "would have preferred to grow up in a household . . . where the children came first". Angelica is scornfully described as a whiny spoilsport, the sort of little girl who would tell on her siblings if they climbed a too-tall tree. She is "a minor character [who] arise[s] from her corner and proceed[s] to put herself in the center of a rather marvelous story that now threatens to become ugly". But, as Malcolm doesn't point out, of course all children want to be put first — and the rackety artist's lifestyle, for all its beguiling shabby glamour, isn't the most stable of environments. Angelica is a victim of the old Chinese curse — "may you live in interesting times." Malcolm, on the other hand, refuses to consider that interesting times might not be to everyone's taste.