“... it come off?’ he asks, and answers: ‘Not quite.’ Muir thought it lacked ‘causality’. Virginia Woolf also disliked Ulysses. One gets a sense that in those years innovation was wanted, thought necessary, apparently sure of a welcome; yet when it appeared – as in James and Ford and Lawrence and Woolf and ...”

“... identify itself with an aesthetic, and it was this, perhaps, which aroused the envy and wonder of Virginia Woolf, who found herself unable to work the artistic miracle the other way round, to move from the aesthetic and the social into the world of desire which unites and animates the two. In a sense, the most blatant of Proust’s pretences is the whole ...”

“... most copiously in Autumn Journal, the one long poem MacNeice wrote that has survived its occasion. Virginia Woolf thought it feeble, and MacNeice was apologetic about its topical, personal, rambling journal-form: but now it seems not only the fullest expression of the poet’s sensibility, but also the truest expression of its moment in history – the ...”

“... a go at him and everything he felt he stood for. Leavis in 1956 was certainly disillusioned about Virginia Woolf, Auden, the Bloomsbury set in general, even Eliot. But what irritated Priestley was his rejection of the 18th-century novelists – Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Smollett – whom Priestley most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ...”

“... for things in the early part, in the narrator’s consciousness, can be delicious: as good as Virginia Woolf, or John Betjeman, who would have adored subtle pentameters like ‘The irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were ...”

“... Edith Hope, 39 and unmarried, is staying at an-end-of-season hotel, on Lake Geneva. She looks like Virginia Woolf, but as ‘Vanessa Wilde’ writes moderately best-selling romances of the traditional, Georgette Heyer kind. She has resisted the urging of her agent to produce the more fashionable ‘bodice rippers’. It gradually emerges that Edith has ...”

“... social absolutes and work strongly in favour of egalitarianism, indeed almost compel it’. If Virginia Woolf had used the interior monologue more radically and consistently, she would not be the snob in her writing that is sometimes revealed. Those critics ab extra, the author and his reader, would necessarily be dissolved into an impersonal ...”

“... that his concept of the ‘stream of consciousness’ influenced the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but his major literary legacy may have been an unwitting contribution to the prose style of Gertrude Stein. James’s masterpiece, which took him 12 years to write, was the two-volume Principles of Psychology. Published in 1890, it is still ...”

“... of with manic states. Byron, Blake, Coleridge, the Jameses, Melville, Van Gogh and, of course, Virginia Woolf are all tested, by their works and their known heredities, for bipolar illness and the findings are positive. While Jamison acknowledges that ‘there are many artists, writers and composers who are perfectly normal from a psychiatric point of ...”

“... in ducky little plastic bags decorated with (trademarked) Levine cartoons of Stephen King, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison or John Updike (gender and ethnic propriety are carefully observed). What is most dispiriting about these Barnes and Noble stores is the expansive blandness of their produce, and the prominence given bestsellers ...”

“... Harold with various unnamed lovers. Vita with Rosamund Grosvenor, Violet Keppel Trefusis and Virginia Woolf. (Vita’s one monogamous passion was for Knole, the Elizabethan house that she grew up in but lost; even in politics she was a Mugwump, remaining notoriously neutral during the Spanish Civil War.) And then there are the theatrical ...”

“... against all this, and search for meaning in ordinary, un-spotlit lives, demanding to know, with Virginia Woolf, ‘whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography – the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is ...”

“... he edited with Adam Smyth. Making them has remained one of the print professional’s crafts, as Virginia Woolf learned to her displeasure when she wore her eyes out compiling them. (Pulling together an index from a floor littered with little squares of paper wasn’t as gripping as setting type and sewing bindings.) But the index was also something ...”

“... sense ever pretended that Lucky Jim was a work of art in the way that Ulysses is, or something by Virginia Woolf, but that in itself is not to say that Lucky Jim was not, for many readers in the Fifties, an overwhelmingly powerful book. ‘The importance of being Amis ... is in a sense greater than the sum of his works, individually considered as ...”

“... liking it. Of the designs, my favourites include the fully three-dimensional flowering of the Virginia Woolf plate, whose ceramic petals spill out and over into billowy waves, and the improbably froufrou, frilly pink folds of Emily Dickinson. There is something at once ridiculous and touching about the work, the mismatch of its grandiloquent ...”