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“... but not brutally. And it has left an interesting bruise to finger and ponder. Reviewers of Helen Muir’s earlier novels have found her tone at once delightful and unsettling. Her narrative moves recklessly fast, always on the edge of an apparently uncontrollable authorial giggle. It’s a style which I find it hard to tune into: but plenty of ...”

“... above a thousand ships, and it is perfectly clear that ‘her’ and ‘she’ refer to Helen throughout. If Kenneth Palmer had retained the Folio colon after ‘aunt’, it would be necessary to explain in a note that the first ‘she’ does not refer to Aunty Hesione. It may be argued that this is what notes are for, and that it is best to ...”

“... one woman said to another. ‘He likes photography, but not fashion photography.’ Robin Muir, the curator, and the set designer, Patrick Kinmonth, have no doubt done their best but the Portrait Gallery is an awkward space. From the main corridor and the rooms that usually host the modern part of the NPG’s collection, they’ve created 15 ...”

“... building. ‘Some with flour, if baking, wet clothes, if washing,’ wrote Effie’s lieutenant Helen Crawfurd. And any missile that came to hand. Helen wrote of how the bailiff would run for his life, fiercely pursued by the mob in their aprons, mad for justice, brandishing wooden spoons. The engineers and labourers ...”

“... they could do no harm, and were not subjected to fetters, forced labour or the lash. ‘Palmer and Muir got land grants, and even managed to turn a profit in the rum trade’, for long the colony’s chief commercial activity – thirst being universal – before Muir made his daring escape, only in the end to die in penury ...”

“... the mornings’ (Hogan). He: ‘His body ... shot up like a trunk from his middle.’ She: ‘In Helen Huddleson he had seen a trunk of truism branching forth into womanhood.’ When Hogan’s narrator remarks (a propos poppies and their effect on his lover), ‘they punctured him with my personality,’ is it at all salutary to bear in mind that Mrs Ros ...”

“... battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John Muir, also of the SLP.The strike ended after a couple of weeks, with the engineers accepting a rise of a penny. ‘This is an engineer’s war,’ Lloyd George, then munitions minister, warned. ‘And it will be won or lost owing to the efforts or shortcomings of ...”

“... been so keen to be a Hugh not a Christopher, and a MacDiarmid not a Grieve.MILLER: It was Edwin Muir’s great joke about MacDiarmid’s acolytes. ‘Men of sorrow and acquainted with Grieve.’Lichen covered the wet stone. We went inside the church and signed the book. The place seemed recently abandoned. A Bible was open on an oak table and dead flowers ...”

“... convert to Roman Catholicism, a bestselling author and a tormented nun, very properly named Sister Helen of the Transfiguration, but we don’t have to wait to the end to know about all that; her future is frequently mentioned proleptically. The narrator seems to be looking down on a completed action and picking out events at will; chronological sequence is ...”