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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... include Davenport in his pantheon of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his ...”

“... more elegant and friendly kinds of pseudo-precision, somehow reminiscent of a campus art-shop, Virginia Woolf’s shadow features on a clean tee-shirt, like the Turin shroud. Yes, but – there are no ‘yes, buts’. The body is what all this is about and it dispenses In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around But difficult to read correctly since ...”

“... an uneasy parable about communication. Plotlessly, the story proceeds from ‘The Stones in Virginia Woolf’s Pockets, 1941’ (‘Burgled’), to ‘Sophia Tolstoy’s Carpal Tunnels, 1863’ (‘After transcribing War and Peace for the ninth time, Sophia Tolstoy lifted her wrists to the sky, tried to unball her fingers, and let her numb fists ...”

“... Hoggart’s cultural reference-points have always been overwhelmingly literary. Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf and Robert Louis Stevenson appear in the first, short, paragraph of this book, and Auden, James and Flaubert have all made their appearance before the end of the second page. Re-reading The Uses of Literacy now, one notices that a work usually ...”