“... today the site of St Paul’s Cathedral) was rebuilt, and decorated with life-size statues of Elizabeth I and Lud. Here was a London anchored to a past that was demonstrably not Roman. (At the risk of causing disappointment, it ought to be added that the most likely origin of ‘Ludgate’ is the Old English hlid-geat: ‘postern’ or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... man without heroes is the second volume of Power’s projected trilogy entitled ‘Children of the North’. Out of the north – to reverse an old Gaelic saying – comes the utmost despair. The Power novels are set in Belfast, but a Belfast deprived of every feature that gives it its character. As in the ordinary ...”

“... Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed ...”

“... behind. But the novels also belong to an important tradition of English writers, mostly women – Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor and Rumer Godden and Penelope Fitzgerald among them – whose subject is the old world of class and empire, and the systems of education and intricate cultural codes that supported ...”

“... like the East India Company or those formed to exploit the millions of acres of land taken in North America after the French and Indian wars. But others, less well known, are no less intriguing. Among these is the Levant Company. First chartered in London near the end of the 16th century as a joint-stock venture, the Levant Company soon devolved into a ...”

“... the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s imagination it’s more likely to have been in Aldeburgh. Although Dickens never went there, he knew and admired George Crabbe’s The Borough, which describes Aldeburgh’s workhouse as archetypically ...”

“... common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it looks. Being a woman writer is only partly a matter of how any ...”

“... Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been ...”

“... conventional. They lived only briefly in Greenwich Village and moved to Vermont, settling in North Bennington, a town where residents ‘generally wanted nothing to do with you unless your family had arrived before the American Revolution’, as one inhabitant put it. North Bennington, lightly fictionalised, is the ...”

“... without her husband’s permission, but tells me why she doesn’t approve of Republican candidate Elizabeth Dole. ‘I think that God has ordained the man to be the leader and the woman should be his help and mother,’ Mary says. ‘I believe the man should hold the highest office of the United States and women do not have the God-given authority to run a ...”

“... Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, the ‘Puritan Earl’ who, as president of the Council of the North, was commander-in-chief in England’s northern Catholic badlands, in the battle between popery and a beleaguered and pugilistic Elizabethan Protestantism. Andrewes’s duties under Huntingdon included the attempted (and apparently often ...”

“... to return to rural Georgia after around five years spent pursuing a career as a writer in the North. The parallel is one of the many in-jokes in O’Connor’s fiction. Like Asbury, O’Connor found herself desperately ill on a train journey south. Initially it was thought she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, but tests in February 1951 revealed ...”

“... an anatomy of human feeling. The role of the female novelist is thus in a sense supplementary: Elizabeth Gaskell admits that she knows little of economics, but one function of the Victorian novel is to nurture the lived experience, interpersonal values and affective pieties which those economics are in danger of brusquely dispelling. The Dickens of Hard ...”