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“... wearing it as a badge of honour was Carmen’s approach to life and whatever life threw at her. A small woman, she towered in others’ perceptions, and her reputation for ferocity went before her. Tributes to her (she died on 17 October) have rightly remembered her gift for friendship, her love of roses, little dogs, cricket, ‘junking’ (aka antique ...”

“... the same as the other guests who sipped Tio Pepe (medium or dry) from Lilliputian glasses and did small talk while Alexander and I handed around the shiny peanuts (bald, like the vicar) after first shovelling out fistfuls for ourselves.True, Daddy’s mother spoke with a heavy accent, recited proverbs in several languages we couldn’t understand, and sighed ...”

“... the necessities. The local boozer stood by itself round the corner from there.’) His girlfriend Helen is nowhere to be seen, and there’s no sign of her even at the novel’s end. He plays country tapes when feeling sorry for himself, makes a blind stick by cutting the head off a mop; still talking to himself in the old familiar way, he gasps for a ...”

“... She had only listened to saints. But the Rent Strikes brought her out to the world with her small fists clenched in a white-knuckle fury. Fathers were dying in trenches. Children and wives were put out on the street. Effie was sick at her Glasgow windows. And looking down she saw other women, swaying sick at their windows too. Women stood on tenement ...”

“... family were never told of the research. Dr Grey [sic] claimed the donor’s name was Helen Lane or Helen Larson (supposedly in order to protect her anonymity). In the 1970s Henrietta’s name was released and the Lacks family were shocked … to them a part of their mother is still living and is being made to ...”

“... a degree that its ability to influence the BBC’s international news agenda will be diminished. Helen Boaden, director of BBC news, has recently been put in charge of all news operations, including those of the World Service, and has a seat on the BBC’s executive board, its highest level of management. The foreign affairs select committee recommended that ...”

“... extended family of bustled and corseted female cousins ‘like very large empty omnibuses on very small wheels’ offered little sympathy. The worst blight of her upbringing, however, was, by her own account, her mother’s violent temper – the sudden unpredictable rages of which her daughter was the main object. Against the staid routine of county society ...”

“... room as it is, I want nothing to change.’ In an essay written recently for the New York Times, Helen Yglesias describes books as the means by which she escaped from an oppressive New York childhood. When, in her fifties, she began writing rather than reading them, books formed the means by which she returned to engagement with life’s problems. Sweetsir ...”

“... is implied by the clothes covering it. The book ends with an anthology. It includes a remark from Helen Olcott Bell which should be included in a general challenge issued to those who do not believe salvation can be achieved through small things: ‘To a woman,’ she writes (read ‘man’ as well), ‘the consciousness of ...”

“... forth/with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launcher.’ Teens on ‘Saturday night/in small-town downtown’ are ‘piled/like marsupials in the backseat’s pouch’. An earnest, dull professor ‘read a chapter from his own book:/naptime./He didn’t care when our heads tipped forward on their stalks.’ When not sleeping through lectures, the ...”

“... life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to visit she had to sleep in another room. Carr ...”

“... scansion across the hammered metal of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers – a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily. And yet to criticise Walcott for being derivative, or for his showmanship, is both small and mean-minded. (‘Fear of imitation obsesses minor poets,’ Walcott has written, and not ...”

“... dreams in time? Cities, great pools of forgetfulness,’ Murray wrote to her friend, the novelist Helen Anderson. There is something about this sentence, and many of the lines in her poems and letters, that makes us think of what would become the New York School of poetry, and it isn’t surprising that Ashbery should have responded to Murray’s work. That ...”