... enthralling ... If the BBC knows its business, The Lost Girls will soon be a sexy, soap-operatic, partner-swapping, highly addictive miniseries ... Today’s readers may feel that Lys, Sonia, Barbara and the others, despite their proclaimed independence, were still defining themselves through the men in their lives. Perhaps so. Still, because of D.J. Taylor’s vivid and affecting group biography, the 'lost girls' will never be lost again.
... an exploratory and sometimes eye-popping slice of social history ... it does not ultimately matter that Taylor’s lost girl idea is a romantic dream, because the real subject of his book is not the scandal and gossip that these girls surrounded themselves with, though there is plenty of that, but the complexity of human beings and how different they can seem to different people ... Taylor is a strikingly versatile writer — novelist, critic, historian, author of the standard biography of Orwell, and the acerbic wit behind Private Eye’s What You Didn’t Miss column ... If you have even a passing interest in human relationships and the imagination, you should not deny yourself the pleasure of reading it.
... enjoyable ... an often very funny chronicle of fiendishly complicated and rackety love lives ... Sometimes even Taylor’s enthusiasm for the arcana of the higher literary life falters as the unglamorous evidence of office life stacks up ... the parties of the past, like charm, charisma, conversation and what Taylor refers to as 'stupendous good looks' are difficult, if not impossible, to recreate for those who weren’t there. Although Taylor’s wry fascination with this moment of British social and intellectual history is infectious and mostly deliciously readable, it does occasionally feel as if he is peering through a grimy wartime window, trying in vain to lip-read the clever chatter of the partygoers inside.
