“... Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...”

“... in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976. Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963; between those dates he lived a long and harrowing life, the general details of which have become well known. They include the early death of his editor-father, the family’s return from San Francisco to Massachusetts and New ...”

“... way. Margot Tennant had always possessed the self-confidence and judgmental sweep of someone born to great wealth and social prominence. Her family were pioneers of chemical bleaching. The Tennant plant outside Glasgow was the largest chemical works in the world at the time, and its towering chimney was a famous landmark, known as Tennant’s ...”

“... they are thinking their own thoughts. Cooke isn’t nearly as well known as she should be. She was born in 1927, in Lewisham, where her parents ran a hardware and grocery shop. ‘My mother wouldn’t let me go to school till I was six and a half,’ she once said. ‘She didn’t believe in schools.’ As a child Cooke spent much of her time in the ...”

“... In memoriam Emmanuel Stratas, born Crete 1903, died Toronto 1987 After I’ve lit the fire and looked outside and found us snowbound and the roads all blocked, anxious to prove my memory’s not ossified and the way into that storehouse still unlocked, as it’s easier to remember poetry, I try to remember, but soon find it hard, a speech from Prometheus a boy from Greece BC scratched, to help him learn it, on a shard ...”

“... problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the ...”

“... beautifully composed and nuanced; as original and haunting as any work by Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter or Virginia Woolf. According to her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, McCullers wrote seven drafts of The Member of the Wedding, yet there is nothing artificial or over-polished about its fluid, poetic style or its brilliantly compressed drama. This ...”

“... Betty Cofer, a former slave of a plantation-owning family, in North Carolina: Here, in 1856, was born a negro girl, Betty, to a slave mother. Here, today, under the friendly protection of this same Jones family, surrounded by her sons and her son’s sons, lives this same Betty in her own little weather-stained cottage. Encircling her house are ...”

“... to reinforce the reputation of ‘the Palladium of public credit’. It is at this point that Anne Murphy takes her bird’s eye view of a day in the life of the bank. In her acknowledgments she expresses some apprehension about having plumped for this approach, but she need not have worried. This is a model of economic history, acute, profound and ...”

“... span covers southern New England, her father’s domain, and Ireland, where her mother was born. Her temporal range extends from the Reformation to the present, barely granting a distinction between then and now. She went to art school, not university, so the visual arts have exerted a lasting influence on her, not least in the way each book, each ...”

“... whose creative work was allowed to lapse unexamined in a man’s world.But when Elizabeth Miller, born in 1907 and comfortably reared in Poughkeepsie, first arrived in New York and attracted public notice, she did it by typifying the post-Great War flapper, a new creature who threatened old norms of female being and behaviour. Fashion for young girls began ...”

“... half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen Anne, Marco Polo and Jesus Christ. Her fluency brought her compliments on her ‘industry’ in which she detected ‘a delightful superiority’: she was a connoisseur of condescensions. It also brought her undisguised insults. Stung by Mrs Oliphant’s review ...”

“... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William ...”

“... was roaming the cold hills of Scotland. Defoe, who toured through the area where James Thomson was born, thought little of it: agriculture in Roxburghshire was in a pitiful state, the people suffering a terrible famine from the effects of bad weather in 1709. The first poem which made the young poet’s name – and marked him for life – was, not ...”

“... space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle ...”