“... 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 ...”

“... all approachable by the same dull steps, all fended off by the same pattern of railing’). Virginia Woolf puts in a brief appearance when Ashton quotes from a story in which a character imagines that ‘if one lived here in Bloomsbury … beneath the pale green of umbrageous trees, one might grow up as one liked.’ This is meant to encapsulate ...”

“... continues still in North Korea. It lingered too in more local processions and pageants, such as Virginia Woolf invents in Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe, who stages a history of England, may have been modelled on Edith Craig, the artist daughter of Ellen Terry, who designed some of the movement’s banners. When he created the spectacular story of the ...”

“... an iota of civility on that account, is as keenly conscious of the coupling as Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf. ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study,’ his secretary Theodora Bosanquet, who crops up as a character in this novel, remarked, ‘he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... such tremulous, responsive, imponderably harmonised bodies, appear in the writings of Henry James, Virginia Woolf (The Waves) and even Rudyard Kipling, as well as those of others mentioned by Luckhurst, such as Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee and Grant Allen. The concept of telepathy continually threatened to collapse distinctions between the literal and the ...”

“... bewilderment at the ‘readiness with which the postwar generation throws in the sponge’. When Virginia Woolf, saddened by the death of her nephew Julian Bell in Spain, called on women to see that Fascism, war and patriotism were all the work of men and adopt a principled pacifism, Rathbone dismissed her out of hand, quite careless of the fact that ...”

“... good fetishism not from The Sense of Things, but from Brown’s inventive and searching essay on Virginia Woolf and objects, which appeared four years ago in the journal Modernism/ Modernity. It’s odd that no comparable account appears in this book, where the argument does at times depend on knowing the difference between an object and a thing, though ...”

“... His notebooks do not belong to the respectable genre of the writer’s diary, of which Virginia Woolf was an ideal practitioner. Williams’s notebooks are far more elliptical; they pose existence as a problem not to be overcome by description or eloquence. I won’t demean his notebooks by calling them raw material. Call ...”

“... about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write about them, led me to Virginia Woolf and the term she coined: ‘frock consciousness’. On 6 January 1925, at the beginning of her diary for that year, she wrote: ‘I want to begin to describe my own sex.’ That thought recurs in the diary as the months go on and it is ...”