“... There are​ more weird households per novel in the work of Elizabeth Bowen than in that of any comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life ...”

“... in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the 1930s, more or less on the run with her husband, Hans. They had been in Switzerland, France and Holland before returning once more to France. The Fittkos had both been victims of French internment policy, which was already ...”

“... by year almost regardless of his written efforts. Ellison rose up the celebrity ladder, but had no more secure social basis than he had possessed in his years of poverty. He had nothing, really, that could make him comfortable with the superior things he could do and knew he could do, except to try to do them at a continuous, towering level. It led, as we ...”

“... Jerome, whose Latin Vulgate version survived to become the official Bible of the Catholic Church more than a thousand years later. The passage was often used to justify the bar on women priests. ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence’ because ‘Adam non est seductus, was not seduced; but the woman being ...”

“... Growth Pact adopted at Amsterdam on 16 June this year, the Governments of the Union must not spend more than they receive in taxes and other income each year than the equivalent of 3 per cent of their state’s national product. If they overspend that limit this year, or plan to do so next, they will not be permitted to take part in the common currency zone to ...”

“... and a piece of autobiography. She also left two daughters (Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson) and more than a million words of diaries – work that some consider her greatest achievement, and the editing of which led to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was. The two things people know about ...”

“... Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A Likeness’ by his previous biographer Joan Richardson (I haven’t read her ...”

“... in Prussia of less than 2 per cent of the relevant age-group; university education was even more restricted. As it happens, this maximised the chances of the children of disproportionately prosperous small communities such as the Jews, especially given the high status that learning enjoyed among them. That is why the Jewish share in Prussian higher ...”

“... with residential apartheid and job discrimination as they moved North. A falsification that held more universal sway among whites than did any Stalinist rewriting of history in the Soviet Union transformed black Americans in the post-bellum South from victims of re-subjugation into political and sexual predators. A century after the Civil War, a ...”

“... were run up for them on the premises. By 1966, Carnaby Street was overrun with ‘buyers from the more staid clothes retailers who have come to spy out what the young are buying next’.The consumer boom owed much to the rise of the office, itself a result of the inexorable growth of the service sector and the Tory government’s decision in 1954 to lift ...”

“... 1924 Edwin had published an article called ‘Women – Free for What?’ in which, channelling Thomas Carlyle, he wrote that ‘the age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to work.’ It was Edwin who sent Women: An Inquiry to Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, but ...”

“... I travelled with him in India, and I saw him in hospital in London just before he died in 2018.More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul and reflecting on his influence! Yet it is only in the last few years, the dust having settled, that I have seen how complex our relationship was, how important – how crucial – it was to my becoming a writer.To ...”

“... his shoulder and would complete the full term’s reading and papers in its first weeks to leave more time for playing tennis. When he was 14 he was ranked the 17th-best player in the Midwest and ‘around one hundredth in the nation’. ‘Competitive tennis, like money pool,’ he wrote in an essay, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate ...”

“... Bonheur as a daddy’s girl, the memoir written by her final companion, Anna Klumpke, describes a more complicated relationship. Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre is an odd hybrid of first-person testimony coupled with extended sections of ventriloquism, where Bonheur narrates her life in her own words. (The long overdue English translation, by Gretchen van ...”