“... in English-speaking countries, is a heritage from Modernism in its prim anti-Victorian phase. To Virginia Woolf, for instance, it was not a question of what might be brought into the novel – sex, the natural functions – but of what should be kept out. In the reaction against the Victorian novel, it was understandable that the discursive ...”

“... of tobacco, on which Kiernan touches, is rather iffy from the radical point of view. Colonial Virginia and Southern Rhodesia rested on forms of peonage if not slavery, and Cuba is probably more disfigured than otherwise by its reliance on a tobacco economy. (Indeed, it would be interesting to study the degeneration of the Cuban revolution as a function of ...”

“... marriage was not as black as the lugubrious relishers liked to paint it (both Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf were impure witnesses for the prosecution), and he shows too that there was often a sportive collusion, easily misconstrued, between Eliot and his first wife. The happiness of Eliot’s second marriage necessarily looms less large. Partly this ...”

“... by pleasure. A hundred years later Barrett Browning had become a damsel famed in story. In 1934 Virginia Woolf observed that ‘“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one ...”

“... lower reaches where men, women and children were dehumanised by wage slavery in mines and mills. Virginia Woolf described a typically bourgeois sense of insecurity when she recalled the attitude of her father, Leslie Stephen, to money: ‘Not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade ...”

“... turn on one another and the rest of nature, are glossed by readings from Melville, Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Derek Walcott (‘then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors’) and Heathcote Williams (Whale Nation, 1988). The spoken texts play in and out of the deafening audio mix as whales breach, icecaps melt, huge shoals of fish migrate from ...”

“... Christopher Robin do in one sense bear a resemblance to the enlightened groups of 1909 (when, as Virginia Woolf sardonically put it, human nature changed), so Milne’s theatre world made strenuous efforts in the direction of uplift, sexual equality and the pacifist community, under cover of soft wit and a softer frivolity. Shaw’s St Joan and ...”

“... over-exertion alternates with boredom; an alienating impatience infects every human dealing. When Virginia Woolf expressed admiration for what she called Russell’s ‘headpiece’ she used a telling expression: his intellect was a kind of appendage or incubus, inharmoniously attached, and too great a weight for a mere mortal to bear. He was like one of ...”

“... of Plomer’s young landlady in Bayswater by her deranged husband, a horror that strongly excited Virginia Woolf. Plomer’s ability, charm and homosexuality made him friends among writers, as did his humour. It amused as well as suited him to conceal his sexual nature, and he was delighted when Robert Graves once held forth to him about that of Wilfred ...”

“... to alcoholism or manic depression, forgetting that Ernest Hemingway was an alcoholic, Virginia Woolf a manic depressive, Dostoevsky an epileptic. Lincoln is suspected to have suffered from a hereditary connective tissue disorder. Achievement does not necessarily go with good health. Genetic screening could be beneficial if it were to be ...”

“... handsome man he was at every age, and photographs bear this out. One dissenting voice was that of Virginia Woolf, who, at the time of her visit to him in 1926 and indeed at most other times, was in a warts-only mood, and did not appreciate the fine build and the splendid shock of white hair, concentrating rather on the ‘reddish ravaged face’ and the ...”

“... Medieval warfare has been unfairly neglected by students of Medieval society. Even if war is, as Virginia Woolf claimed, a ‘preposterous masculine fiction’, it still deserves at least as much attention as some rather more fashionable fictions appear to command. The works under review made 1984 a good year for Medieval war studies, and it is to be ...”

“... can occasionally irrupt with invincible common sense: ‘he puts Katherine Mansfield above Virginia Woolf, a “too well-educated woman writing her best” ’ – which at least provides food for thought; he thinks Galsworthy ‘a gentlemanly ass’; he asserts that copulation ‘has no connection with “passion” in the real sense of the ...”

“... difficult to tell if it is we or he who are eating them. There is a marked synaesthesic effect, as Virginia Woolf implies in her essay on Woodforde in the Common Reader, and I suspect that her famous account of the dinner dishes (the boeuf en daube) in To the Lighthouse acquires its memorableness from her sense of the parson’s placidly recurring roast ...”

“... the academic culture of honour and reputation as easily and comfortably as men do. Perhaps, as Virginia Woolf thought, it is better that we don’t. Still, I hear that festschrifts for two female historians, Jose Harris and Pat Thane, are being planned. I await them with ...”