“... opinion, college was all about. ‘Who’s your father?’ he asked Madeleine. ‘Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?’ ‘In my case,’ Madeleine said, ‘my father really is my father.’ ‘Then you have to kill him.’ ‘Who’s your father?’ ‘Godard,’ he said. To ‘find out what everyone else was talking ...”

“... everyone he met. He was painted by Duncan Grant and gushingly admired by Lytton Strachey, while Virginia Woolf thought he had ‘a head like a Greek god’. He performed in plays alongside Rupert Brooke and was the model for George Emerson in Forster’s A Room with a View. And he was a great rock climber, perhaps the best. He missed the first year of ...”

“... wedding rings, to help his Abyssinian venture, Iris patriotically threw hers into the cauldron. (Virginia Woolf records her saying so, in her Diary.) So much from this period has been tidied up that we could be mistaken in thinking we are getting a ‘real sense’ of Iris. Back in 1922 she became friendly with MacKenzie, a young Cambridge-educated war ...”

“... close friends in Cambridge with a number of those who were later to be dubbed ‘Neo-Pagans’ by Virginia Woolf – notably Rupert Brooke and Jacques Raverat (a wealthy French boy who went to school at Bedales). This group of rich and self-regarding undergraduates, with their literary pretensions and amateur dramatics, are a rather less palatable aspect ...”

“... At Mrs H.G. Wells’s funeral on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a Companion of Honour and a trustee of the Reform Club ...”

“... be imposers, female writers masochists. Is it not remarkable that there is only one female Modern, Virginia Woolf? No wonder we’re all so afraid of her. Pritchett’s fiction is suspended in place and time. On the Edge of the Cliff contains several stories set in present-day London, but the mild convulsions they describe could just as easily have taken ...”

“... claim to find – political, religious, social, intellectual – is almost entirely conceptual. Virginia Woolf attacked Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells as realists who defined character only by stubbing the end of it into clothes, income, social status and so on. She faulted a generation for its vivid exteriors. A new generation of realists might be ...”

“... Doctor John Langborn; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her spaniel Flush, immortalised by pet-lover Virginia Woolf; and so on. The significant point is that, more often than not, pets help humans to acquire ‘sympathetic tendencies’, as Locke insisted, and here the contributors to Animals and Human Society miss an opportunity to enlarge their ...”

“... valued friends. There were many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and ...”

“... his survey of how countries attempt to deal with historical injustices on a portentous note: ‘Virginia Woolf might have said that on or about 5 March 1997, world morality – not to say, human nature – changed.’ Woolf’s often-quoted line referred to a Post-Impressionist art exhibition organised by her friend ...”

“... capable of both thoughts. Mike Nichols, who directed Taylor and Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, once asked her whether it was ‘a pain in the ass’ being so beautiful and she replied: ‘I can’t wait for it to go.’ Her part as Martha (for which she won an Oscar) required her to gain weight and to be made up unflatteringly to look ...”

“... partnership, and an artistic one, too. It was like that image of masculine-feminine collaboration Virginia Woolf uses – a man and woman getting into a cab together, to go somewhere – in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf claims the best writerly mind would be like that: collaborative within itself, androgynous by virtue ...”

“... Velvet, starring a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. It sometimes seems that the enthronement of Virginia Woolf in the canon has entailed the demotion of a whole generation and a bit of women, not just Bagnold (born 1889) but Rose Macaulay (born 1881) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (born 1893). This seems especially unjust when one of them successfully ...”

“... most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a party she was tapped on the shoulder by Virginia Woolf, who said, somewhat dampeningly, ‘Remember: we won this for you.’ Nearly twenty years younger than Woolf, on the threshold of adolescence in 1914, Lehmann was more ambivalent about the past. The world ...”

“... forces of its age. Neither critic can find much value in Modernism: Mimesis ends by rapping Virginia Woolf sternly over the knuckles, while Lukács can see little but decadence in Musil and Joyce. The upbeat humanism of both men is affronted by the downbeat outlook of the Modernists. Both are doctrinal life-affirmers, high European humanists ...”