“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of contemporary women novelists’; the New York Times Book Review compared her favourably with Virginia Woolf; Edith Sitwell said that she and Emily Brontë were the two great woman novelists, and so on. Her career was well established even before she married Snow, and they became a significant double act, acclaiming each other’s masterpieces; for ...”

“... Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so slightly asymmetrical and as such bear some relation to life ...”

“... 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 ...”