Stella Gibbons of Gibbons's "most enjoyable and vicious" satirical portraits. In her introduction to the book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received. The public's expectations were still prejudiced by "Cold Comfort Farm", which by 1949 had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback. Anticipating that a sequel would be popular, that year Gibbons produced "Conference at Cold Comfort Farm", her shortest novel, in which the farm has become a conference centre and tourist attraction. There is much
Ada Lovelace person to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities. Lovelace has been portrayed in Romulus Linney's 1977 play "Childe Byron", the 1990 steampunk novel "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the 1997 film "Conceiving Ada", and in John Crowley's 2005 novel "Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land", where she is featured as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel. In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia", the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly (a character "apparently