bray and scarff: It sounds familiar to me, too. I wonder if we aren't thinking of Yeats' poem, Easter 1916 (about the Easter Uprising in Ireland): "All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born." The same poem is the source of a Maeve Binchy title, Too Long a Sacrifice.|||I did a little digging and I got nothing. It's frustrating because I'm pretty sure the titles of the other books in the series (Rebel Angels and A Sweet, Far Thing) come from poems, so I reeeeeally thought A Great and Terrible Beauty would, too. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything to suggest it does. I think it's just one of those well-worn, mildly old-fashioned phrases people use from time to time.|||The line "A terrible beauty is born" is repeated several times in "Easter,1916," a poem by William Butler Yeats about the Easter Rising, a bloody episode in Irish history.|||you probably have then.