Notes from a small island

The Guardian last week ran a fascinating profile of Shirley Hazzard, the vaguely Australian writer who for decades has lived mostly in New York and Capri. She is, like the heroines of her books, "good with words":

"The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. I feel that people are more unhappy, in an unrealised way, for not having these things in their lives: not being able to express something, or to profit from somebody else having expressed it. It can be anything but it's always, if it's supreme, an exaltation."