“... just as a broken control knob can evoke what is wrong with the world. In a bristling essay on Elizabeth Smart for the Dublin-based literary magazine Gorse, Bennett expressed a dislike of ‘accomplished’ writing: ‘I have a fancy for a rather more dappled conflation of vagueness and exactitude, flippancy and earnestness, aplomb and ...”

“... and Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942. But this new score, commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in July 1942, was not for a ballet company but for Graham, America’s high priestess of modern dance. The ‘inner life’ that emerged was complex. The dance, a tribute to land and liberty, faith and fervour, had the look ...”

“... to canonised titans like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, but to contemporary Black poets: Elizabeth Alexander and Terrance Hayes; Harryette Mullen, Reginald Dwayne Betts and Evie Shockley. (He is one of the few young poets who has learned from Hayes without copying him.) But if Charleston represents a new generation of Black writers, he faces similar ...”

“... In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories about the UN (‘the Organisation’) – is written with a mordant, Waughish ...”

“... of commitment to Freedom of Information among the ICO’s top brass. The current commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, dedicated only half a page to FOI in her latest annual report. Such indifference is not altogether surprising: the commissioner raises twelve times her FOI budget from the levying of data protection fines on businesses. (During the ...”

“... Carmen exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert ...”

“... their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was ...”

“... of its Offenders’ Book. Is it Mary Colliford’s historical due to be remembered for calling Elizabeth Lugge, the spinning teacher, ‘gig, runagate, speakarse and baggage’? We are told nothing else about her; maybe nothing else may be known. John White wrote of most people being ‘known too well to the world to love the smoke of their own ...”

“... of the novel we hear of the murder of a local mill-owner’s son – an event that was to inspire Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. Yet, though it can be readily situated in terms of a public history, the material of this absorbing novel – a sort of 19th-century handmaid’s tale – is bizarre enough. What will happen to the seven young women so ...”

“... doctrine and practice of mental reservation which was particularly advocated by the Jesuits. While Elizabeth I, unlike contemporary Catholic sovereigns, never instituted any heresy prosecutions or conducted a general inquisition into religious beliefs, her government did demand conformity to the national Church, with fines for non-attendance, the requirement ...”

“... Most of the gains that women have made over the last decades have come about when women have taken a share of positions and opportunities hitherto reserved, by law or by custom, for men. And it is when this happens that we tend to get the most immediate and vivid sense that things have changed for both women and men. (The visibility of women in the US Army produces this sense in me, a Briton living in the US: it makes the British Army now seem peculiar ...”

“... getting to the end of their shelf-life) and to the fulsome praise of the then highly influential Elizabeth Bowen. Soon after the book’s publication its author wrote modestly and accurately of her gift. I quote from Diaries: ‘I do not think I have any “creative” genius. Whatever I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to recognise things. If I ...”

“... scant half-crust. (“That bread alone was worth the journey,” they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.)’ This provoked disdain and wrath on the Letters page, and a response from Angela in the shape of a postcard from Austin, Texas. On the front was a picture of a violently steaming ...”

“... he little believes, who aye in winsome life/Abides ’midst burghers some heavy business’). Elizabeth Bishop is a delight to read; Thom Gunn contributes a charming piece on surfriding; and Marianne Moore, considering the sea as a grave, has a linethe birds swim through the air top speed,            uttering catcalls as hereforethat ...”

“... uninhabited, and with rabbits scampering over the great steps before the main entrance. Elizabeth Bowen, another Anglo-Irishwoman, applauds the sangfroid and ingenuity of the ‘big house’ people who refused to relinquish the reputation that dogged them, that of being ‘the heartless rich’, while struggling to stay solvent and keep a watertight ...”