People, Places, Things

Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, also wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in ""Hungary,"" ""Prague and the Crisis,"" and ""Bowen's Court."" In ""Britain in Autumn,"" she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris in a series of essays that are startling in their evocation of tense diplomacy among i