“... 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 ...”

“... than usual, so that the section can plausibly be revealed, later on, to have been written by the Virginia Woolf-loving Briony Tallis; yet he must also please those readers who want his usual effects – tight plotting, withheld revelations, dark secrets, turning points. Martin Amis is right to consider this long passage McEwan’s best piece of ...”

“... my own bags, I slipped on my own mopping. I went to a fantasy dinner party with General Custer and Virginia Woolf, and I never came home again, or else when I came home they’d moved it.It must be dawn soon, if it weren’t winter. I get my gloves on – or perhaps somebody else’s, you get your fingers mixed up at my age – and I make my way to the ...”

“... Why? Because the child’s still dead.’ There are of course traces of dimly remembered abuse in Virginia Woolf, ghostly visions in corridors, shadows that fall across the page. The woman speaker of Beckett’s Not I is haunted by some ugly, not quite spoken event. And something that’s never named happens to May Sinclair’s young Harriet Frean down ...”

“... The scale of what the abolitionists were up against is only now becoming clear. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, opposition to anti-slavery may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the ...”

“... North excludes all non-academic criticism, so despite his title we hear nothing of such critics as Virginia Woolf and Cyril Connolly in Britain or Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley in the US. ‘There is much to be said … about the history of the idea of “criticism” before its entry into the university,’ he concedes in a footnote. ‘Naturally I ...”

“... where ‘the hard chairs, the skimpy wine, & the very nice sensible conversation’ left Virginia Woolf cold but where, as Geoffrey Grigson remembered, one might bump into Braque … or Jean Hélion from Paris, or Eliot gayer than his reputation, actually singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’. The exodus from Hitler’s Reich having begun, one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... intended by such a description: think, rather, of the impetuous, supercharged narrative manner of Virginia Woolf, or the cumulative music of Henry James. Where syntax and the overall shaping of a sentence are concerned, Clampitt can match both these supreme artists in the way she reflects the state of an enquiring or apprehending mind by means of the ...”

“... of the future. Philosophers debated the nature and duration of what we experience as ‘now’; Virginia Woolf explored in her novels heightened moments of the extended present; and the cinema ‘thickened’ the present into slow time, by prising open and expanding particular moments and events. The present ceased to be ephemeral and ...”

“... such as Wells, Shaw, Bennett, Jerome K. Jerome, Harley Granville-Barker, Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf. Britain shows that the society sponsored lectures on a broad spectrum of arts subjects (with literature predominating), provided a forum for sustained discussion of the relationship between art and politics, and spawned a range of cultural ...”

“... symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius just seems to make it happen that way. But in fact he tried very hard indeed. No novelist is more ...”

“... and a business as a Famous Donor Sperm collector, to galactic war and resurrection by an avatar of Virginia Woolf. Sometimes, one has to say, Science Fiction just seems too crowded. Too many people have had too many ideas, and now they come too cheap. Just the same, two things in which the genre has become pre-eminent have been the creation of archetypes ...”

“... be open in every biography worth a publisher’s advance. The subjects of Victorian biography, as Virginia Woolf put it, had been ‘like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions through the street’. Froude’s Carlyle blew open the citadel of privacy. It encouraged public speculation about what Jane ...”