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“... Ingalls has a calm way of presenting her ornamental imaginings which is highly effective. John Bowen’s agreeable new novel, The Girls, opens with a pig on the loose in a gift shop, one of those village contretemps by which minor events of the time are afterwards computed. The shop, full of home-made produce and hand-crafted objects, is owned, stocked and ...”

“... the Sylvia of Parade’s End, still called herself his wife and would not free him to marry Stella Bowen. His partnership with that talented woman, bedevilled by these other women and other evidence of Ford’s polygamous nature, lasted about ten years, and she accepted its end with the sort of honourable renunciation that Ford’s code prescribed and which he ...”

“... is a fighter. He’s a gentleman. He likes a beer.’ In​ her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen describes a train trip from London to the Kent seaside. It’s one of the most extraordinary journeys in English literature. Without stretching the bounds of the real, she takes her young protagonist, Portia, from a 19th-century milieu – a ...”

“... biography, in circumstances that are severally illuminating.In November 1933, writing to Elizabeth Bowen, he advanced in capsule form his two chief propositions or preoccupations: I quote Ignatieff’s summary:The philosopher Malebranche had observed that since the moral ends which human beings commonly pursued were in conflict with each ...”

“... an MP and by 1593 had been elected speaker of the House of Commons. Within two years he had become Elizabeth’s solicitor general and then her attorney general, a post in which he achieved celebrity as a foul-tempered prosecutor, first of the Earl of Essex, then of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘Thou viper … thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart!’) and of ...”

“... There are maps both in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, which deals with bohemians in general, and in Andrew Barrow’s, which is a study of two in particular, but the street plans of Soho, Paris or Munich are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly ...”

“... who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a Joycean ‘collideorscope’ of ‘conglomewriting’. If you’re sceptical about Beckett or Elizabeth Bowen’s familiarity with the Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis or Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics, Muldoon argues that there’s no distinction between one text and the next when the féth fíada or ‘magic mist’ comes down. This gives him a ...”

“... into Eliot’s orbit was consistent with her being so far away, and distance was what he craved. Elizabeth Bowen summarised an evening at home with the Eliots in August 1932 as ‘two highly nervous people shut up together in grinding proximity’. When he accepted the invitation to give the Norton lectures, he was thrown by the thought that being on ...”