“... a handbag: acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the ...”

“... analogous to that faced by feminists, and in the section on ‘The Body Politic’ Marina Warner, Hermione Lee and Sandra Gilbert explore the ways in which women might or do speak and write so as to convey their experience in a way that communicates a female point of view without being disenfranchising. Marina Warner writes of ‘Fighting Talk’, the ...”

“... John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and contours suggested by his or her ramifying contacts and associations. He gave as an ...”

“... already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham psychodrama and Bloomsbury libido. But some ...”

“... fact impose by the author’s private, subjective view of the life within and around that house. Hermione Lee, in her indispensable, scholarly, penetrating and sympathetic study of Bowen’s work, puts her finger on the tap-root of her author’s powers when she says that her ‘best work was done in the “subjective”, “personal” novels and ...”

“... but, all the same, Wright is perhaps rather too hard on them. In her biography of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee describes Lehmann as one of the ‘ambitious, thwarted, talented young men’ who ‘rubbed up against Leonard’s adamantine proprietariness and perfectionism ... It was a well-known joke among their friends that working at the Hogarth Press ...”

“... trained academics; she further and less continuously laments that it is too often not done at all. Hermione Lee proposes the example of Virginia Woolf, who hadn’t much time for either dons or literary journalists. She believed that ‘one should try to read books as if one were writing them,’ and advised an audience of Cambridge undergraduates ...”

“... had enough and Miller was relieved of duties, the position now open for a more experienced hand. Hermione Lee, then at work on her biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, was invited to be Miller’s successor, but had to decline, sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He ...”

“... and all the rest of it. This is perhaps a trifle unfair to the good work done previously by Hermione Lee and Victoria Glendinning, to name but two more orthodox critics: but it does indeed help – and very strikingly – to remove Bowen from the socially feminine personality on which her admirers used fondly to dote, and see how far she can run ...”

“... capitalism (The Roots of War, published by the Hogarth Press in the same year, took this line). As Hermione Lee pointed out in her biography of Woolf, Three Guineas reiterates much of the debate over peace and war which split the Left in the mid-1930s, but whose complexity, it might be added, has disappeared beneath the weight of that derogatory ...”

“... and she becomes ‘no longer capable of following the action on the stage’. So it was with me. Hermione Lee’s biography of Edith Wharton was published on 1 February. On 2 February, I sat behind Professor Lee to watch Happy Days at the National. In Wharton’s story ‘His Father’s Son’, a man stealthily ...”

“... Stephen noted), but with the help of his indefatigable assistant and eventual successor, Sidney Lee, the ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no ...”

“... St Aubyn’s chair of judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical ...”

“... Could I yet again suppress the inner groan as the apparently tricephalic hybrid of Harry-Ron-and-Hermione proceeded to do exactly the same thing yet again, or as, once more, I had to recite a tedious recapitulation of the past? Some books, though, just read themselves – E. Nesbit with her wit and hidden political mischief, C.S. Lewis when his eye was on ...”

“... of human lives and relationships, and also the most pleasurable. ‘Biography,’ as Hermione Lee says, ‘has so much to do with blame.’ Biographers deal in the back and forth of accusations. I could sniff the mud clinging to them, and if I somehow knew they might bore or disgust me, it may be that I feared they might excite me too. But ...”