In The Thing in the Forest the opening story of A S Byatt rsquo s latest collection two young girls evacuated during the last war to the English countryside witness a monstrous creature in a sunlit wood Rolling toward them devouring everything in their path comes a grotesque worm that appea

Penelope Fitzgerald rsquo s family crops up often in her prose She alludes to her two Victorian grandfathers one the bishop of Manchester and the other of Lincoln to her uncle Monsignor Ronald Knox and to another uncle and aunt who spent their engagement in the 1890 rsquo s corresponding with