“... 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 ...”

“... she desires. Never has the passion of novelist for protagonist been so intently formulated. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Artemisia is a kind of dance with its protagonist: through it course all the relations that the author can devise with the fascinating woman whose biographer she has decided to be. The lost novel has been recast as a novel about a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... If you will promise never to be funny at my expense, I will promise never to be funny at yours.’ Virginia Woolf later described the character of Alroy Kear – Maugham’s instantly recognisable portrait of the amiable, self-promoting Hugh Walpole (who regarded Maugham as a friend) in Cakes and Ale – as ‘a clever piece of torture’, a ‘flaying ...”

“... suggests a series of possible influences ranging from Defoe and the Arabian Nights to Rabelais and Virginia Woolf. He also criticises García Márquez, probably justly, for having an excessively teleological vision of his own work, and seeing the books produced before One Hundred Years of Solitude simply as preparation for the ‘great novel’. Vargas ...”

“... that historically, ‘the women writers of highest achievement’ – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf – did not have children. Sylvia Plath did, and look how that turned out. And for all ‘the endless sanctimony about how important it is’, Kipnis writes, child-raising ‘is not … a socially valued activity’ – an inconvenient truth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf’. Yet, Hardwick wrote, ‘the information came forth with a tomba oscura note: all they had was a poste restante, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1947 … She is, as they say, not in the picture.’ Randall Jarrell tried to revive interest in Stead a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”