“... they could hardly believe, at first, that he was caught. ‘She has him by the snout,’ wrote Virginia Woolf: ‘... a sublime but heartrending spectacle.’ ‘Don’t marry her,’ Vanessa Bell advised. ‘However charming she is, she’d be a very expensive wife and would give up dancing and is altogether to be preferred as a mistress.’ Lopokova ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that,’ Jill Bennett shouts back. ‘Fucking actors!’ 15 March, Leeds: ‘Me, I’m afraid of Virginia Woolf’. Thora Hird arrives to film the main scene, in which she meets her son, and questions him about his private life (or lack of it). We are due to film in the Civic Restaurant below the Town Hall, but shooting cannot start until it closes, so ...”

“... Saviour’s littered with torn-up bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the ...”

“... Stalin’s game, the tell-tale word ‘correct’ infecting the harder-line analyses. Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1937, Stephen Spender gave his unvarnished view of the Brigade: ‘The qualities required, apart from courage, are terrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism ... or else toughness, cynicism and insensibility ... the truthful live in Hell ...”

“... housemaid. Not many Johannesburg miners rejoice in the richly blooming confusion of their lives. Virginia Woolf saw the world as a bundle of vivid fragments, but one wonders if her gardener did. Perhaps Murdoch evolved against the grain of her age, starting off as a woman writer and ending up as a lady novelist. The latter title might also be reserved ...”

“... characters who instantly presented themselves, and later instantly reminded you who they were. Virginia Woolf complained that, when he feared a reader’s attention might wander, Dickens would throw another character on the fire. Woloch more sympathetically observes that his description of minor characters often ‘ebulliently dilates’. He believes ...”

“... that Powys, in a Victorian manner, somehow made a contribution to the impressionism explored by Virginia Woolf: ‘the seaside of Weymouth Sands is a Boudin painted by Monet.’ Perhaps. But in After My Fashion he strikes me as more like a thoroughgoing Victorian, offering the sort of landscape painting Ruskin admired in William Dyce. (The ...”

“... expense of reticence is boringness, and if you want literary gossip you’ll still have to go to Virginia Woolf, and if you want self-revelation, to D.H. Lawrence. Nevertheless the letters are the man – or such of the man as he allowed the world to see. And because the man was a great artist, even that shaped and shielded self is worth ...”

“... servants were often bizarre and at the end of his life became highly disquieting to his friends. Virginia Woolf remarked that Jane Austen was the hardest of novelists to catch in the act of greatness, and something like this might be said of Hartley too; but greatness caught in fiction’s act can often have a derivative element to it, and Hartley’s ...”

“... that had a direct effect on women’s lives. In its earliest days, suffragettes and feminists like Virginia Woolf were invited to speak, and later pressure was put on governments on a range of issues: equal pay, maternity provision, equal compensation for war injuries, the payment of Family Allowance to mothers not fathers, school meals, uniform telephone ...”

“... think Bossy might have said of Evennett’s book on the Counter-Reformation something like what Virginia Woolf said about Middlemarch: the first English novel written for grown-ups.) More recently, the old Bossy reappeared in his Birkbeck Lectures, delivered in Cambridge, where St Charles Borromeo’s version of Catholicism was contrasted with ...”

“... indicates, although she makes little of it: feminists’ relationships with their mothers. Women, Virginia Woolf once wrote, ‘think back through our mothers’, but what Inventing Herself shows is that feminists are much more likely to do the opposite, defining themselves in opposition to mothers who are seen as prohibitive and soul-destroying – an ...”