“... in Italy. Through her cast of diverse characters, Gallant assembles a record of mid-20th-century North America and Europe. Everywhere she looks she sees a story; her appetite to get inside it, to render its particular textures and its localised meanings, makes her a magnificent ventriloquist and interpreter. The ventriloquism is her form of sympathy – for ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... as long as those punished remained comfortably remote. The fort of Grozny in the north Caucasus was so named by Russia in the 19th century with the idea that the Chechens would find it terrifying. As de Madariaga points out, however, in English ‘there is a nuance between dread and terrible: dread is what one is; terrible refers to what one ...”

“... woman William married – Lucy Madox Brown, the daughter of Ford Madox Brown and his first wife, Elizabeth Bromley. Lucy seems to have been pushed to the side when Elizabeth died. Relations with Brown’s second wife, Emma, and her children were always tense. As a young woman, Lucy worked as an apprentice in her father’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the misnamed ‘Year of Africa’, ‘a new era of the African Church was about to begin’; and Elizabeth Isichei has clearly felt the same Christian impulse from a somewhat more African-centred approach. Both writers are using a scale of reference wider than that of a mere transition from colonial to para-colonial institutions of African ...”

“... The best place​ to begin Elizabeth Allen’s study of sanctuary seeking in medieval England is the coda: ‘Sanctuary in Southwest Georgia, 1962’. Here Allen vividly recounts an incident from the American civil rights movement in which her father, Ralph Allen, played an important role. He was one of two white college students who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign ...”

“... and Valentine Ackland, who were among his earliest enthusiasts, and subsequent correspondence from Elizabeth Wade White, another collector and supporter, and Peter Pears. Valentine introduced Craske’s pictures to her friend and occasional lover Dorothy Warren, who owned a gallery in Maddox Street (the one from which police confiscated D.H. Lawrence’s ...”

“... and the FWP’s special consultant on folklore, noted on 14 January 1937: Farm Woman (Case #2): (Elizabeth Bradley) The story is pointless save as a commentary on the benevolent institution of slavery . . . Capitalise Negro throughout. Par. 2: ‘Familiar traits of the Negro race’ is bad . . . Occasionally there are blanket statements in which ...”

“... market town of Romford, to the village of Havering-atte-Bower, well off the beaten track to the north. One of Dr McIntosh’s greatest successes is in contrasting the development of the very different areas which made up the Liberty of Havering. The work that has gone into this study began, 28 years ago, as a PhD thesis on Havering’s most famous ...”

“... touring the Birmingham factories. Nice Work has epigraphs from Sybil, Hard Times, Felix Holt and North and South, and we are warned (in the words of Charlotte Brönte’s prelude to Shirley) to expect something as ‘unromantic as Monday morning’. It isn’t quite as dour as all that, but nor is it as blithe as Lodge’s earlier Rummidge novels, Changing ...”

“... the status for cemeteries that service African townships such as Alexandra and Soweto, to the north and south of the city. Cemeteries can, however, move up – and presumably down – the league table. Alexandra, which once had the unfortunate distinction of occupying the only ‘E’ slot ever allocated by the municipality, was recently upgraded to ...”

“... of Richmondshire, on towards Skipton and the Lake District, and down the Ribble valley into north Lancashire. It is a question whether these new outbreaks were independent and spontaneous, or deliberately propagated from the original flashpoints. But there is no doubt that they were accompanied and fed by rumours and fear. The Government in London was ...”

“... the cloak-and-pipe fellow who was dropped for the Earl of Essex. His other colonial fiasco (the North Carolina settlement which vanished without trace in 1586) is only slightly more remembered. Britain was never seriously to colonise South America, and there never was an El Dorado in the form Ralegh sought. But his reckless, unpopular, foreigner’s sort of ...”

“... Nobody knows​ … nobody knows.’ Elizabeth Bishop said her grandmother’s remark was the chorus of her childhood. ‘I often wondered what my grandmother knew that none of the rest of us knew and if she alone knew it, or if it was a total mystery that really nobody knew except perhaps God.’ She ventured to ask: ‘What do you know, Gammie, that we don’t know? Why don’t you tell us? Tell me!’ Gammie wouldn’t say whether she was keeping a secret or confessing bewilderment; she just laughed and replied: ‘Go on with you! Scat!’ This image of a person obscurely in the know, at once self-collected and reticent, is also an image of the person Bishop became – or the one many took her to be ...”