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“... servants – appears as well in her view of Bishop at Harvard. ‘In the second fall at Harvard, Elizabeth began to see and take her place on the enormous, conservative, sexist campus.’ This is merely funny, since Harvard has no ‘campus’ to speak of, and since one could more truly say: ‘began to take her place in the congenial literary, liberal ...”

“... in Ireland as everywhere else, and not just in the Ascendancy circles in which Beckett grew up. Elizabeth Bowen records that when her house was temporarily taken over in 1922 by the young soldiers of the IRA they avidly seized from the shelves the thin scarlet Kipling volumes and seemed to find themselves and their aspirations given substance and ...”

“... or enclosure, the zoo as a scene of novelistic action, the zoo as a place where a character in an Elizabeth Bowen novel recalls being given tea by an aunt, the zoo as the subject of a book issued in the same series with a book on aeroplanes by Christopher Caudwell, the zoo as a place where Stephen Spender thought it worth telling Geoffrey Grigson he had ...”

“... like a dream roster, an all-time heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing ...”

“... to a roomful of creative writing students, something on the lines of ‘We’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, now think of a house where you were happy, but you no longer live there. Write it!’, they all bent their heads down over their paper and began writing. I couldn’t believe it. When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the ...”

“... from immune to the romance of Irish insurrection. When Maxwell suggested she read the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, Brennan took back, without a word, a favourite portrait of Colette that she had hung behind his desk. Later, visiting London, she was ‘outraged’ to find that the only available map of the city was ‘the one with the “Bastion of ...”

“... Mansfield’, her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often didn’t add up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so ...”

“... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s ...”

“... abandon the ranching experiment and move to Ireland they had to buy their big house. There was no Bowen’s Court to write a history of, as Elizabeth Bowen did. They made up for this shortcoming with an unquestioned loyalty to the empire and a cult of the stiff upper lip. The two were inextricably entwined, as Keane ...”

“... woman … In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary had never been created.She describes Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in ...”

“... transitory, confused, insipid, banal. Dickens and Thackeray and Proust, Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Powell – they are all packed with lunches and dinners, balls and parties, which one would much rather not have been at, but which art has contrived to make glorious for us by proxy. Unfair to compare diaries with ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the ...”

“... there is a fractured, banally proverbial quality to much of his dialogue which is more than just Elizabeth Bowen in demotic. I would like to be able to say, in the approved manner, that this biography has led me to ‘reread’ a good deal of Pritchett, but I have to confess that I have largely been reading him for the first time, culpably so in the ...”

“... Rich’s girlfriend like? When was somebody ever going to spill the beans on Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen?Was there some way, I wonder now, that she wanted me to absolve her? Was the fact that she never mentioned, on any of the occasions we talked, her equally prominent female companion – they lived in the same Manhattan building – a sign of ...”

“... in 1969. The success of Sinn Féin in the May elections added fuel to the fire, while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds people from staunch unionist backgrounds voting Alliance and ...”