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“... indicates a high degree of expertise in the author. Ancient Enemies is a new departure for Elizabeth North. She has, before, left tantalising trails of unexpected connections and consequences; she has also, notably in Everything in the Garden, proved that she can produce a masterly pastiche of period speech and behaviour. Here she has done both of ...”

“... have difficulty in finding a firm standing ground from which to view their disintegrating scene. Elizabeth North’s Florence Avenue takes a group of survivors from the flower-children period. They now have teenage children themselves and have made various half-hearted adjustments to the bourgeois world. Monica, who tells the story in her own grisly ...”

“... and legal norms, or distinct territorial enclaves. It follows that the revival of separatism north of the border should be seen as more than a result of changes within Scotland itself. Rising Scottish nationalism has also been a function of a more widespread weakening in the sense of UK belonging. Some of the reasons for this weakening are well ...”

“... that it conveys some of the divisions operating within the landed class. Its prime gentry heroine, Elizabeth Parker of Alkincoats, later Elizabeth Shackleton, is shown moving among a wide array of lesser landed, trading and professional acquaintances. But, as Vickery points out, she was ‘not on visiting terms with noble ...”

“... The earliest poem collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s miscellaneous drafts and fragments, opens: I introduce Penelope Gwin, A friend of mine through thick and thin, Who’s travelled much in foreign parts Pursuing culture and the arts. ‘And also,’ says Penelope ‘This family life is not for me ...”

“... published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at ...”

“... means to have him committed like his father, Howard leaves. He reinvents himself as a grocer in North Philadelphia, and marries a garrulous woman who ‘spoke words out loud as she thought them up’. Leaving Maine, he thinks: Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed ...”

“... than all the tracts combined to bring anti-slavery into the kitchens, parlours and hearts of the North. Scholarly insistence on the close ties between the rhetoric of anti-slavery and the rhetoric of women’s rights, and among the major figures in both of these antebellum movements, has resulted in an outpouring of books and articles on women and ...”

“... world which is both instantly recognisable and fantastical: School was a long brick building on a north- south axis. South: Main Door through which all boys and girls must enter. North: Kindergarten, its large round windows gazing onto the backwoods and surrounded by a hedge of highbush cranberry. Between Main Door and ...”

“... There are​ more weird households per novel in the work of Elizabeth Bowen than in that of any comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life ...”

“... Clarence Walden, the former mayor of the Aboriginal settlement of Doomadgee in north-west Queensland, and the Aboriginal land-rights activist Murrandoo Yanner. In 2006, Walden unsuccessfully opposed ministerial proposals to reform the permit system that restricts public access to Aboriginal lands. Yanner waged an energetic but ultimately ...”

“... utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was Douglas Crase’s The Revisionist. Out of print for almost forty years, it has now been reissued (Carcanet, £12.99) in a volume that also includes ...”

“... Trading into Hudson’s Bay controlled around a million square miles of territory in British North America, with trading rights that extended to the Pacific. It persuaded Indigenous trappers to swap beaver pelts for firearms and tobacco, drawing them into transatlantic capitalism. In the first two-thirds of the 18th century alone, trappers provided the ...”

“... Flamingo Park and went out some days to swim at Copacabana. It was that time between the death of Elizabeth Bishop and the appearance of the first biography and this volume of letters, when the ordinary reader on this side of the Atlantic knew very little about her. I did not know that for 15 years she stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is ...”

“... in two wars, other divisions arose: between ‘Trekkers and accommodationists. The Cape and the north. Potgieter and Pretorius. The Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Hendsoppers and bittereinders. De Wet and Botha. Hertzog and Smuts.’ To this list one should add rich and poor. Between the 1860s and 1880s a disastrous series of agricultural slumps ...”