“... else who has written about Wilson, especially the women, to distance herself from her subject. Virginia Woolf, whose essay on Wilson was published in The Moment and Other Essays, in 1947, was extraordinarily ambivalent. The author of A Room of One’s Own is contemptuous of Wilson’s ‘scribbling for cash’ and, drawn reluctantly to admiration for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... books, like her journalism, are larded with quotations, from recherché antique cookery books to Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Walter Scott. Her approach is not in the least like the gastronomic dandyism of the ‘food-for-food’s sake’ crowd: she is holistic about it. She is obviously a truly civilised person and, for her, knowing how to eat and to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Marcus ends by quoting from A Room of One’s Own the sentence, ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ which Virginia Woolf gave as an example of the kind of sentence she wanted to see more of in women’s fiction, for so long dominated by women only ‘in their relation to men’. It’s a sentence, Marcus observes, that has been milked for lesbian potential by ...”

“... 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 ...”