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“... on, having spent the intervening decades hoping that nobody would find out about her shamefully smart past, she has decided to tell all and to make a ‘defence of debutantes’, in a valiant but doomed attempt to get us to take them seriously. It is doomed not least because MacCarthy herself, once past the preface, can hardly keep a straight face. She is ...”

“... in more than one place to ‘St Bagehot’, which I fear reflects the uncritical adoration this smart performer received in academic quarters in the Packenhams’ youth. The essence of Bagehot’s view is that the Queen is merely an Appearance, while he and others who spin coins in the city are the Reality. The rest of the population are more or less ...”

“... they cross the Brazilian border to buy industrial alcohol to drink. And in For Prayer and Profit, Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder paint a comprehensive – and grim – picture of the alcohol-assisted decline of the rural Tonga communities in Zambia’s Gwembe District. In Zambia drink and economic decay have complemented each other over the years and ...”

“... with the heroine finding what she is looking for in ceasing to care about it, in getting some more smart clothes and deciding to design them in Paris for middle-aged women like herself. James would have been amused but also disturbed by this new form of literary démarche in which real living, as it were, takes over so completely from the sweet mystery of ...”

“... from refining the lurches of Hopkins’s work – ‘his imagination is drenched in “the rash smart sloggering brine” ’ – Paulin’s essay encouraged, promoted it. Here, he said, was a poet whose work issued not from the centre, but from the peripheries: ‘its language,’ he asserts, ‘issues from the ranks, not from the officer class. That ...”

“... the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.’ The Elizabeth Bishop who likened knowledge to water, ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’, would probably have agreed. So the introduction is an obvious disaster; the 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets ...”

“... ventriloquism is her form of sympathy – for all sorts of protagonists, nice ones and mean ones, smart ones and silly ones, the intense, the doomed and the hopeful.Gallant was born in Canada in 1922. She describes her early years in the semi-autobiographical Linnet Muir stories. All but one are collected in Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks’s selection of ...”

“... later work, to the older authorial convention of a time-free consciousness. As a pre-war writer Elizabeth Bowen made gestures towards the Modern but preferred her own pattern of individualities. She was not much of a theorist, though she liked to advance her ideas on fiction boldly and with a certain panache, in what she would have described as a ...”

“... Flamingo Park and went out some days to swim at Copacabana. It was that time between the death of Elizabeth Bishop and the appearance of the first biography and this volume of letters, when the ordinary reader on this side of the Atlantic knew very little about her. I did not know that for 15 years she stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is ...”

“... stories in particular remind me of those by an expert in the art from a previous generation, Elizabeth Bowen. ‘Wilderness Tips’, which is about a nice family at their lakeside holiday home, and the city interloper who has married among them, would have specially pleased the older artist. The daughters of the house all have matching names ...”

“... and De Valera. The subtitle ‘20th-century Lives’ does not disqualify a Great Victorian like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was born in 1836 and in 1873 became the first woman member of the British Medical Association (she died in 1917). Harold Oxbury is principal editor of the Concise Dictionary of National Biography 1901-1970 and it is from the parent ...”

“... Song for the Herring’, versified from a book of 1881, which sounds a bit like Christopher Smart. And 1881 was the year Craske was born. There are lots of short threads like this in the book: among other things, we pick up information about the Glandford Shell Museum, the Little Auk, Gilbert White, sea fishing, the Elephant Man, Edwardian ...”

“... as Winston Churchill used to grip the arm of his chair, the duty of the male was to provide. For Elizabeth Baker, an incisive young woman who had trained as a teacher, the male’s job was to ‘make something’ of himself. The domestic inappropriateness of this view was quickly overshadowed by the economic hopelessness in which she and her brood were ...”

“... Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was a daunting prospect and Harold pointed out that for the same money they could buy an intact ...”

“... this country. It judges that Christopher Fry has a place in conversation, but not Roger Fry, nor Elizabeth Fry. The spy Fuchs has a substantial entry, but whereas the Macmillan Encyclopedia adds ‘his motives were idealistic,’ Pan considers it wiser to leave out that possibly unpatriotic thought. Ordinary people are of course not interested in French ...”