“... single-author studies. They do not sell, unlike postcolonial anthologies and bluffer’s guides to Virginia Woolf. In the prelapsarian 1960s, a typical critical essay might be entitled ‘Window Imagery in the Later Pasternak’, while in the theoretico-political 1970s, ‘Class Struggle in The Divine Comedy’ was a more predictable topic. By the 1980s ...”

“... in him something. That’s how.’ ‘Broke what?’ ‘Broke what breaks.’ (‘Take Pity’) Virginia Woolf said that her books would have been ‘inconceivable’ without the death of her father: she needed him to die before she could write about him in To the Lighthouse. Something similar seems to have been true of Malamud. Although he had written ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Beard says that she often returns to Dillard’s essay ‘The Death of a Moth’, a homage to Virginia Woolf. For those of us left cold by the pervasiveness of autofiction – and its ubiquitous references to prime real estate, cuisine and kink – Dillard persists as a distant supernova in a sub-zero vacuum: once upon a time, essayists sought the ...”

“... read about Brooke in the papers knew nothing of this, and nothing of his charm and beauty (Leonard Woolf: ‘His looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the ...”

“... justifies her choice partly by citing another critic’s account of why he decided to write of ‘Virginia Woolf’ rather than ‘Woolf’, but his professed surprise ‘that feminist critics should be willing to reduce her to her husband’s name in this way’ seems peculiarly beside the point for Oliphant, who ...”

“... objects’ he has in mind are those reflected on (and with) by a quartet of eminences: Virginia Woolf, from whose short story the book takes its title, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Each eminence gets a chapter, which charts in monographic fashion the development of his or her reflections on objects and objectivity. The field ...”

“... the cover of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or lovely like the cover of a biography of Virginia Woolf) offer clues to genre and style; it’s not just that they recall us to the bookshops, the bedsits, the libraries, the schoolrooms and the towns where we first read them, and the friends who first recommended them. It’s the promise they ...”

“... be such as might be prone to cause them any displeasing impression.’ And much more in that vein. Virginia Woolf, all the same, picked up some displeasing impressions about the future of this man whose mind she liked. Mirsky was trap-mouthed: opened and bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth: wrinkles in his ...”

“... than insist on obvious names. In the last chapter of Mimesis, Auerbach links his method to that of Virginia Woolf and other 20th-century writers of fiction: There is greater confidence in syntheses gained through full exploitation of an everyday occurrence than in a chronologically well-ordered total treatment which accompanies the subject from beginning ...”

“... physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, and curiously finished off with a high green silk headdress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she ...”

“... baby. Rosie – feline, self-satisfied – is a right-on radical and feminist (photos of Lacan and Virginia Woolf are pinned on her study wall; she claims she’s writing a politico-sociological study of snogging), who gets her kicks from the picturesque violence and chaos on the streets. Their friends – a pretty American photographer, who’s bedding ...”

“... symptomatic of the times was Houston Baker’s cryptic remark that choosing between authors like Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck ‘is like choosing between a hoagy and a pizza. I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.’ Baker is black, and his career is in great shape. A chaired professor at Penn, he ...”

“... faded. Vengeance is represented here by Judit Torre, a mysterious beauty known as the ‘Chilean Virginia Woolf’, who is the leader of a group of female terrorists bent on killing a member of the security police. Mañungo falls under Judit’s spell and finds himself, within hours of his return, joining the scavengers and thugs lurking in the streets ...”

“... had published his first volume (of verse) before the New York Edition was completed, and that Virginia Woolf was already in her mid-twenties, and writing reviews. Most of these writers meant little to James, but to us they are significant of changes in the times. James must have started from day to day at many a sign of a changing culture. Perhaps ...”