Technicians are working through the weekend to establish how many share accounts were involved and to fix the problem. But Halifax said thebreach is likely to have affected only a “very small handful” of people, and it does not expect to find that any unwanted transactions were made.
David Walkden, general manager of Halifax Direct, promised that if people had “made mischief”, all unwanted deals would be reversed.The problem originated after close of trading on Thursday when engineers tried to amend the dealing system, which was introduced last month. THE HALIFAX’S online share-dealing service has been suspended because users were able to trade other people’s shares with other people’s money. Indian and Kenyan poets, and other opponents of colonial administrations, are not neglected.
All in all, the Cambridge Guide is as instructive, stimulating and illuminating as an indefatigable editor, mostly incisive contributors, and a stupendous purpose, can make it..

Aficionados of social history (for example) may like to note Rebecca Harding’s indictment of American industrialism, Life in the Iron-Mills (1861). This guide goes about the business with the utmost diligence and perspicacity. Well-known terms such as “bluestocking” are satisfactorily scrutinised, and space has been found for quirky snippets of information, such as the fact that the novelist Phyllis Bottome, who lived in Germany for a time, used to patronise the same café as Hitler.
One of the functions of the literary companion is to alert readers to all kinds of enticing works that they might otherwise have missed. We read about social explorations conducted “through the eyes of a female elephant” and pause to admire the mettle of all those 19th-century women travellers.
We find a good deal about fiction promoting “New Womanhood” – continuously, indeed, in accordance with the mores of the day.

We learn for example, something about Maya Angelou’s multiple careers (mother, poet, prostitute, civil rights activist, dancer, actor, producer, singer, journalist and autobiographer), and can ponder the connection, if there is one, between afflictions such as anorexia, depression, insomnia and tachycardia, and the amazing productivity evinced by Joyce Carol Oates. They will wonder, for example, how a writer such as Gillian Avery, author of (among other things) a splendid children’s novel of 1958, The Warden’s Niece, has slipped through the net, or why Joan Lingard should be in but not Jane Langton; or Ruth Pitter but not Ruth Dudley Edwards or Ruth Padel.
Complaint of any kind, however, soon dies away in the face of all the unassailable riches in this remarkable volume It is full of information. But that won’t keep ungrateful readers, even of a compilation as wide-ranging as this one, from latching on to some – to them – unaccountable oversight. Detective fiction is ably treated – even though one of the Dorothy Sayers commentators has missed the feminist implications of Gaudy Night, and the buoyant Californian Sue Grafton is absent (although her contemporaries, such as Sara Paretsky and Katherine Forrest, are not).
Everyone understands that total comprehensiveness is a chimera. Lorna Sage has marshalled more than 300 contributors (here I should declare an infinitesimal interest, being one of them), not all of them women.

Their approach, for the most part, is scholarly and animated. Writers, key works, genres, landmarks and all are discussed with cogency and flair. What’s striking about this guide is its overall coherence and evenness of tone, given the dauntingly piecemeal, patchwork nature of the enterprise.
The exhilarating commentary extends to cookery writers (Eliza Acton, Julia Child, et al), hymn-writers, gardening experts, the domestic novel, regionalism, colonialism and fairy tales. More than that, it shows that reinstatement is in fact no longer an issue, since women’s literary claims have been staked out and consolidated. This guide is as much about moving forward as about acknowledging and appraising the past.
The book’s ambitious scope – chronological, topical, geographical – facilitates an abundant overview, and does full justice to all the odd corners and even dead ends in which assiduous literary activity was taking place.