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“... about himself he is. A really good novelist performing this act is always a joy to watch. Elizabeth Bowen did it brilliantly, though much more ruthlessly than Amis ever did, in the character of Anna in The Death of the Heart. But that special sort of act is absent from You Can’t Do Both – an apposite title because up to now Amis always has. I ...”

“... to locate her characters in the richest and most heady of atmospheres. There’s an essay by Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Out of a Book’, in which she divides child readers into two sets: sensationalists and future students. Among the first lot are those who, in later life, will gravitate towards disreputable novels – children’s stories with sex ...”

“... to make his own, and original, despite the difficulty of its obviously novelish usefulness. Elizabeth Bowen did the same, believing with a certain inner passion, or so her novels indicate, that we remain secretly arrested by early and terminative emotional experiences, smoking away for the rest of our lives and perhaps relit at intervals. The Old ...”

“... reader has other compensations. A specially interesting man, Charles Ritchie, the great friend of Elizabeth Bowen, found in his diary the compensation for his complete failure to be ‘a writer’. Young diarists usually show off. Evelyn Waugh records in 1956 that in the hope of understanding his son Auberon better ‘I read the diaries I kept at his ...”

“... each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year net’ and Cyril Connolly, who organised Horizon’s survey, opted for ‘five pounds a day’ – £100 a day today: ‘If he is to enjoy leisure and ...”

“... anyone who needs reminding how much they have contributed to its literature. Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Shirley Hazzard, Doris Lessing and many other women writers are here (but not Anne Frank or Hannah Arendt), and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet ...”

“... Taking up Connolly’s plea for state support to the writer, Orwell demanded £1000 a year, Elizabeth Bowen £3500, while Robert Graves could only suggest ‘living off friends’, and V.S. Pritchett, with sturdy virtue, opined that ‘the failures of overwork are fewer than the failures of idleness.’ Evelyn Waugh, on the whole in kindly ...”

“... or two after the start of the Second World War, remains the most memorable. It had a foreword by Elizabeth Bowen, rather surprisingly, and was certainly very similar in its atmosphere and method to the French novels which were to become the fashion after the war, although it was also unmistakably Anglo-Saxon, the French ghost impalpable and, at that ...”

“... the 1990s we would have called them cruise missiles; these days, we’d call them suicide drones. (Elizabeth Bowen did refer to them at the time as ‘droning things’.) It wasn’t just London. My mother, then a six-year-old child in Essex, remembers hearing their distinctive putt-putt overhead. She learned that when the engine cut out, the V-1 began ...”

“... by women, from Regina Maria Roche and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) to Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde) and Elizabeth Bowen. If they were solidly reputable bourgeois, Irish Protestants also preserved a secret pact with the vagrant, the deviant, the unspeakable terror lurking in the attic. Exuberant, gregarious and loquacious, they could also be ...”

“... one of the strengths of her fiction. In The Wind Changes, an Irish novel, her central character, Elizabeth, instigates most of the amatory episodes, unexpectedly kissing a Republican leader ‘hardly [sic], spitefully and with anger’. Soon afterwards she’s having sex with the married Arion, who may be a spy working for the British against the ...”

“... old Republican and Communist Peadar O’Donnell. It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big ...”

“... was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently ...”

“... sentence after sentence’. Her criticisms of prominent women writers such as Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen and Woolf appear to be coloured by jealousy, while her praise of lesser-known women writers, such as Ruth Suckow and E.B.C. Jones, seems extravagant. It is something of a shock to discover that the prototype of the pessimistic and deprecatory ...”

“... belong more to the comic underplots of 19th-century English fiction than to a New Zealand reality. Elizabeth Bowen, commenting on the New Zealand stories of the kind Mansfield suppressed, says: ‘their flavour and vigour raise a question – could she have made a regional writer? Did she, by leaving her own country, deprive herself of a range of ...”