“... Four of the remaining five stories (dated between 2004 and 2019) concern episodes in the life of Elizabeth Costello, the fictional Australian novelist who first surfaced in J.M. Coetzee’s work in 1997 and who has made intermittent appearances since then. Here, as elsewhere, she is the voice that speaks of man’s inhumanity to animals. ‘The ...”

“... the people she has listened to all her life. Reminding us of what unlettered women working in the North of England have had to say, she has colonised a territory which remains unaccustomed ground for the novel. But the solidity of her identity as a writer has threatened to impose its own limitations. There were too many moments in the novels succeeding Union ...”

“... copy in Edinburgh University Library. In it he describes the ideal studio as having a northerly or north-easterly aspect, with light from a ‘great and fair’ window without ‘impeachment or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof ...”

“... took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine retribution. They died raving, in the rubble, doctrine decayed into a stream of incoherent curses. No ...”

“... amid the Broads. Still, none of Henry’s devices proved enough to stop a great rebellion in the North, the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth’, the kernel of which was popular fury at monastic dissolutions. The pilgrims requisitioned Durham Cathedral’s ancient banner of St Cuthbert to perform its usual job of ensuring victory on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than ours: perdere la bussola, the loss not merely of bearings but of the compass itself. Queen Elizabeth II will still be around for the vote, I know, but as little more than an accusing spectre. Within less than half of her own reign the glamour of Monarchy has vanished. All that the Crown now accomplishes is to counterpoint and somehow exaggerate an ...”

“... She understands remarkably well the ‘state of the nation’ idiom that came naturally to Elizabeth Gaskell, as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... husband) takes a week off work. A colleague suggests he go on holiday to Kushiro, in the north, and offers to pay if Komura will deliver a package for him, to his sister. Komura is met at the airport by the sister and a friend, Shimao. Komura and Shimao end up in bed together, but ‘after several failed attempts to have sex with Shimao, Komura gave ...”

“... children are tossing a ball back and forth: ‘It fell among the flowerbeds./Or fled to the north gate.//A daylight moon hung up/In the Western sky, bald white.’ The trajectory of the lost toy is symbolic of the march of history, moving ‘eastward among the stars/Toward February and October’. The revolution and the children’s executions ...”

“... to negotiate a course through the vast, multitudinous, close-set and ice-locked archipelago to the north of the American continent. The ice is now melting: within 25 years the Arctic Ocean will probably be entirely free of ice during the summer; some climate researchers believe it could happen as soon as 2013. (Mapping the effects of climate change is one of ...”

“... texts by the same writer, which is not necessarily the most illuminating move. Mrs Gaskell’s North and South might be better read in the context of Victorian sanitation reports than in the context of Cranford. Yet the fact that Gaskell wrote Cranford as well throws light on why the industrial conflicts of North and ...”

“... where he ran amok, insulting generals and riding the equestrian statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put ...”

“... happen often: the family was relatively prosperous petit bourgeois and, besides, the coast of North-East Scotland, where they lived, had never become as totally dependent on the potato for nourishment as other communities in Europe, most notably Ireland. Even so, it happened. The trouble with the easily grown and plentifully cropping potato is that it is ...”