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“... the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s imagination it’s more likely to have been in Aldeburgh. Although Dickens never went there, he knew and admired George Crabbe’s The Borough, which describes Aldeburgh’s workhouse as archetypically ...”

“... Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been ...”

“... without her husband’s permission, but tells me why she doesn’t approve of Republican candidate Elizabeth Dole. ‘I think that God has ordained the man to be the leader and the woman should be his help and mother,’ Mary says. ‘I believe the man should hold the highest office of the United States and women do not have the God-given authority to run a ...”

“... Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, the ‘Puritan Earl’ who, as president of the Council of the North, was commander-in-chief in England’s northern Catholic badlands, in the battle between popery and a beleaguered and pugilistic Elizabethan Protestantism. Andrewes’s duties under Huntingdon included the attempted (and apparently often ...”

“... conventional. They lived only briefly in Greenwich Village and moved to Vermont, settling in North Bennington, a town where residents ‘generally wanted nothing to do with you unless your family had arrived before the American Revolution’, as one inhabitant put it. North Bennington, lightly fictionalised, is the ...”

“... an anatomy of human feeling. The role of the female novelist is thus in a sense supplementary: Elizabeth Gaskell admits that she knows little of economics, but one function of the Victorian novel is to nurture the lived experience, interpersonal values and affective pieties which those economics are in danger of brusquely dispelling. The Dickens of Hard ...”

“... to return to rural Georgia after around five years spent pursuing a career as a writer in the North. The parallel is one of the many in-jokes in O’Connor’s fiction. Like Asbury, O’Connor found herself desperately ill on a train journey south. Initially it was thought she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, but tests in February 1951 revealed ...”

“... would either coax or magic away your doubts.Some hares were also witches, or fairy-folk. Elizabeth Goudge’s astonishing children’s book of 1946, The Little White Horse, written just as the war ended, revels in sugar biscuits and exquisite beauties, and the hare is one the finest beauties of all. They are not, a boy explains, like rabbits: ‘A ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been proud of that as comic dialogue – yet we can hear an echo in it of John Bunyan’s wife Elizabeth pleading for his release before the justices in the repression which followed the Restoration: ‘because he is a Tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised, and cannot have justice.’ The mysterious human values of the poor, again and again ...”

“... Hardy wrote in 1914 of his feeling ‘that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth’, which ‘does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry, or even conjectural prose, but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what ...”

“... my wife, lived with her parents on Friston Estate, a farm 17 miles beyond Kitale, at the extreme north-western limit of the White Highlands of Kenya, the Trans-Nzoia. The farm was only four or five miles from the ridge which formed the border of the tribal homeland of the Suk, more properly called Pokot, a Southern Nilotic pastoral people. Europeans were not ...”

“... door that slams. Six months later he was dead – hit by a car when out walking, after dark, on a North Carolina highway. Accident or suicide? On this question there is still much argument, and the evidence is inconclusive. It is generally agreed, though, by his friends that in the past two years or so (Jarrell turned 50 in 1964) this imperiously vital ...”

“... been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ‘education, training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that ...”

“... French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were ...”