“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seems to be confirmed by the work of other European modernists, not only Auden and Isherwood, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, but Proust and Gide, Thomas Mann, Musil and Hesse. Trapped in the tortuous syntax of a patriarchal society, their texts enact a struggle for emotional expression which is all the more impressive for its ambiguity. Resistance ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and trying to write are not usually twins in the mind of the male writer. But for Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf they are the same. Smart’s great book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, is a delirium of coping and writing, where there is not only a man to be loved and a duty to be borne but also dinners to prepare and beds to make. What we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is pleasant to be afraid when we are conscious that we are in no kind of danger,’ Virginia Woolf remarked in her essay about ghost stories. And a certain level of credulity is necessary really to enjoy tales of the supernatural. ‘Do I believe in ghosts?’ M.R. James asked in one of his prefaces. ‘To which I answer that I am prepared ...”

“... 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 ...”