Miss Hazzard is a serious comic writer because of her remarkable sensitivity to, and control of, English…. [Her] heightened consciousness of speech—her gift for catching and pinning the banalities and self-betrayals of officials struggling in the benign but deadening grip of a great international peace Organisation [in People in Glass Houses]—has directed her attention to what is behind the debased language.

Miss Hazzard's precise use of words sometimes creates little areas of resonance which evoke more than mere muddle and obtuseness. In Chapter Three, outstandingly, delicate counter-implications creep into the presentation of a dull and jargon-ridden meeting…. (p. 513)

Roger Gard, "Satire by Imitation: 'People in Glass Houses'," in New Statesman (© 1967 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 74, No. 1910, October 20, 1967, pp. 513-14.