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“... young know nothing directly about old age and their inquiries into the topic must be done blind. Helen Small, for instance, pronounces with impressive youthful verve and authority on a condition that must still, in a sense, be a closed book to her. Revealing her own age (42), she laments the dearth of serious philosophical reflection on the subject, and ...”

“... This novel, by contrast, could be described as Southside realism, at least in its opening pages. Helen O’Doherty and her husband Hugh live with their small sons on the middle-class south side of Dublin, though Hugh is an Irish-language enthusiast from Donegal and Helen comes from ...”

“... do, but I pre-date the Greeks. I used to describe a limestone plateau where dusty snakes and small owls lived with a people from whose mouths emerged my extensive family. I miss the sound of my original kin as I muck in with this new crowd, biting my tongue when I hear two or even three words stuck together to describe skies my first family got ...”

“... on age, even though he had just turned 88 when the last piece in this volume – his review of Helen Small’s The Long Life – appeared in the LRB. This is the highpoint of the book, not because it ends anything or even gives us the sense of an ending, but because it is so full of the grace of Kermode’s attention to the process of ...”

“... in a meadow gathering flowers                           twirling her own small sunny hours.                           When up rides a man on black horses.                           Up rides a man in a black hat.                           Up rides a man with a black letter to ...”

“... In a court in western Kenya, on 13 July 1934, Major Geoffrey Selwyn and his wife, Helen, were jointly charged with the murder of a ‘native’. Geoffrey Selwyn, my father-in-law, died before the trial began. Proceedings continued in his absence, and my children’s grandmother was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison ...”

“... with a political agenda. Homer could assume that his audience knew the outline of the myth of Helen of Troy, and that in consequence he didn’t need to lay it all out. But perhaps there never was a consistent and complete version of any myth, one that you could walk all the way around and find that everything matched and agreed from every angle. In the ...”

“... with the unfolding story of his new life in America. The second strand of the novel, set in the small Midwestern town of Laurel, is told by Helen, the white social worker who is assigned to look after him. To Helen, the stateless Isaac – whose folder contains only ‘a single loose ...”

“... a great realist, and her powers come from her sense of the way in which communities – especially small, socially anxious, limited ones – construct and guard their reality. She has lived for many years in a rural town in Ontario. I once visited it. It is near water (Lake Huron) but seems landlocked: swamped by land, by the flat lakes of corn that surround ...”

“... see how tall he was. ‘They used to joke that 12 was their lucky number,’ their daughter Helen McKendry told me. ‘He was 12 years older than her, and 12 inches taller, and she had 12 pregnancies.’ Jean McConville was ‘disappeared’ by the IRA in December 1972. Few remember her life. Even the memories of her children, most of whom were very ...”

“... He was a collector, up to a point, though he never had much money; a patron, but only in a small way; an aspiring artist who never made a career of it; a one-time curator at the Tate whose suggestions were mostly ignored and who retired early after years of frustration.Ede was already sixty when he embarked on the venture that became Kettle’s ...”

“... Wartime Lives makes an irrefutable case for the importance of the diaries, but they form only a small slice of the MO repository and tell us almost nothing about the organisation itself. Hinton’s next book, The Mass Observers: A History 1937-49 (2013), a bracing narrative of MO’s founding, practices, struggles and first demise, provides that ...”

“... person tried and convicted at the war-damaged Old Bailey was a stout and ailing Scotswoman called Helen Duncan, whom few people loved and many exploited. She was not a witch in any popular sense of the word; she did not fly, wear a pointed hat or have congress with the devil, and neither she nor her followers imagined that she did. She was a witch only in the ...”

“... original is its image of a young person wholly absorbed in a poem, one chilly spring evening in a small country town, where she sits by the window in an old house trying to catch the dying light With forehead ’gainst the window pane ...   All was silent, all was gloom, Abroad and in the homely room;   Down she sat, poor cheated soul, And struck a lamp ...”

“... memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny brass latch, into which I had put IMPORTANT THINGS: a charm in the form of a watermill whose wheel actually turned, a bright red gobstopper (illegal), a polished stone egg. I was reluctant to let the box go ...”