“... the reader’s natural eagerness to sniff out and to detect a Compton-Burnett situation (or a Virginia Woolf one – see her skit ‘Freshwater’) begins to feel a decided bafflement. For Emily really does seem to have been the perfect mother as well as wife: friendly, accessible and confiding, treating her sons more as extra husbands, both to look ...”

“... continuously laments that it is too often not done at all. Hermione Lee proposes the example of Virginia Woolf, who hadn’t much time for either dons or literary journalists. She believed that ‘one should try to read books as if one were writing them,’ and advised an audience of Cambridge undergraduates thus: ‘Do not begin by being a ...”

“... Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Such connections ensured that he wrote many letters; he asked that they be destroyed after his death, but clearly ...”

“... Daniel Deronda on Mary’s attempt to drown herself in the Thames. The roll-call of Charlotte Mew, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath is a reminder of other women writers who have preferred oblivion to the burden of great gifts and great unhappiness, as Wollstonecraft twice thought she did. Professor Butler ends her introduction with a quotation from ...”

“... by bringing out two novels with Russian settings, spoke of Gerhardie with envy and admiration to Virginia Woolf, who seems herself to have implied an admission that he managed the new consciousness without drawing attention to it in the way she needed to do. At the same time, he did not sell. After Futility, which was in any case by no means a ...”

“... the other hand, is disastrous. One learns that Proust is the author of ‘a massive work’; that Virginia Woolf had ‘the typical agoraphobia of the anorexic’; and that ‘patriarchy’s language’ has prevented the avant-garde from ‘the real liberation of desire’. Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva please take note. The closing section, on art in Nazi ...”

“... brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to wonder whether ...”

“... for example, Stephen Trombley’s dismally representative approach in his study of Virginia Woolf). For many years, the Cambridge stress on the private spirit – practical criticism is an example – helped to energise the study of literature and most critics would admit to having learnt from this informal procedure. Its ...”

“... good hand at a serial’, as he put it himself. ‘Did it hold your interest?’ Hardy asked Virginia Woolf of The Mayor of Casterbridge. Richard Taylor cites this anecdote, to remind us of how fundamental this criterion was in Hardy’s imagination. He thought of himself first and foremost as a storyteller; and a story, he said, must be worth the ...”

“... me to be as accessible as anything that he wrote before the war – one must remember the struggle Virginia Woolf (no slouch as a general reader) had to get through Principia Ethica. But the supposed contrast is anyway quite irrelevant since, with the exception of Principia Ethica, Levy makes no serious attempt to explain any of Moore’s philosophical ...”

“... he used to complain to people for whom ‘my works included me rather than I them’; and nor was Virginia Woolf. They have become themselves, whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A ...”

“... by the impression he made on others. For this reason diary entries like those of Coldstream or Virginia Woolf (‘a nice poetic youth; big nosed, bright eyed, like a giant thrush’) stand out sharply from the text, projecting the light of their time forward into ours. The spontaneity in Spender’s own book, World within World, which reads as freshly ...”

“... it would be much more exciting, in some fantasy scenario, to spy Dickens getting into a cab, or Virginia Woolf coming out of the loo, than to sit down to dinner with either?) When I read Ellis I happened to be working in Westminster myself, in Parliament, and it seemed a nice idea to keep track of the people I saw. The list I made while I was there (it ...”

“... London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian McKellen’. Houlbrook expresses this confidence when he asserts that, contrary to historical and popular orthodoxy, the postwar witch hunt of homosexual men never really happened. For decades, scholars have argued that the early ...”

“... of Forster as almost comically mild, so that Lytton Strachey labelled him ‘the taupe’ and Virginia Woolf wished he would be more open so that one could require him to ‘stand and deliver’; or when we read in P.N. Furbank’s biography of strange outbreaks of solitary violence, when he hurled himself against the furniture. Percy Lubbock, who ...”