“... but description will surely remain the foundation of the most intelligent feminist writing. From Virginia Woolf to Andrea Dworkin, the power has always come from the detail. Naomi Wolf is far more readable and interesting on her anxiety at first receiving a substantial pay cheque or on what her pregnant belly told her about the abortion issue than she ...”

“... at least as welcome to the respectable artisan (much cultivated by feminists) as to anyone else. Virginia Woolf records the shock that ran through a Women’s Co-operative Guild branch meeting when Mrs Bessie Ward ventured to discuss venereal disease in 1917. If only because of their need for a following, British suffragist leaders were far more ...”

“... the other that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally.’ When Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that Russell was ‘brilliant of course; perfectly outspoken; familiar . . . His adventures with his wives diminish his importance,’ she was also saying something about certain connections in her own mind that ...”

“... It has become fairly orthodox to observe – as everyone observes when talking about Schumann or Virginia Woolf or Van Gogh – that Nijinsky’s madness was not unattached to his genius. His choreography is a study in grace and brutality, in his ‘madness’ he invented modern dance, his mind is a set-text in the Jungian analysis of personality, he ...”

“... including Ravel, Fauré, Poulenc and Stravinsky; she also paid for X-ray units for Marie Curie. Virginia Woolf described her much later as ‘the image of a stately mellow old Tory’, and her face was said to be the model for the Statue of Liberty. Woolf reported that the composer Ethel Smyth told her that Singer ...”

“... is like a person about to break down – infinitely scrupulous, tautologous & cautious.’ Virginia Woolf writes in hers that he is ‘peevish, plaintive, egotistical’. The question of whether he will or won’t leave the bank is intolerably protracted, the drama of ill-health (his own, but more especially Vivien’s) seems as if it will never ...”

“... as a rather presumptuous form for a relatively unknown and female writer to choose – suited what Virginia Woolf called Brittain’s ‘stringy, metallic mind’ better, enabling her lucidly to combine the personal and the political. ‘She feels that these facts must be made known,’ Woolf wrote in her diary after ...”

“... the male homosexuals. E.M. Forster visited her ‘in her tower in Kensington, with her love’, as Virginia Woolf put it, to discuss the wording of a letter in support of The Well of Loneliness. According to Woolf, Forster said that Hall had ‘screamed like a herring gull, mad with egotism and vanity’ and insisted ...”

“... of something called literature. The translation a century ago was by S.S. Koteliansky with Leonard Woolf (Woolf’s contribution presumably being to correct the occasional syntactical blemish), and was only rarely reprinted. Now at last there is a new translation, by Bryan Karetnyk, and everyone can contemplate this strange ...”

“... foreign and blithely full of herself. ‘Maynar’ liked your article so much Leonar’,’ Virginia mimicked to Vanessa; Lydia’s ‘spiritual home’ was Woolworths, Clive Bell sneered. Admittedly ‘Lady Talky’ (as Keynes liked to call her) chattered merrily to Vanessa when she was trying to paint, ruining the precious little time she had to ...”

“... his stepfather. Hughdie was, Vidal said, ‘a magnum of chloroform’. He also owned an estate in Virginia, a farm and a mansion at Newport and an apartment on Park Avenue. His mother had Standard Oil shares. ‘He ejaculated,’ Vidal wrote in his memoir Palimpsest, ‘normally, but without that precedent erection which women require as, if nothing ...”

“... When Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it was among the few English novels ‘for grown-up people’, she didn’t explain what she meant. It’s clear that the novel looks back critically (and forgivingly) at the moral youthfulness that lands Dorothea in a marriage to an older man whose scholarly seriousness is uncompromised by wit or sexual charm; but Woolf seems to have pitied Dorothea for hanging on to some of the same earnestness in her second marriage, ‘seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what ...”

“... writings, even though these were inspired, to a considerable extent, by those very same artists. Virginia Woolf became famous and successful long after her death because of public fascination with the Bloomsbury life-style and because of the attention paid to women writers by the women’s movement. Joyce, Lawrence and Burroughs all had to undergo legal ...”

“... and a portfolio of stocks and shares, almost the amount of unearned income – £500 – that Virginia Woolf thought a woman needed to write and have a room of her own. Pratt takes the top floor of a house in Hampstead, buys a car and a fur coat (‘a good dyed squirrel’) and starts a novel. She encounters Hampstead communists and works briefly for ...”

“... experiences as men’s. She has found that gender mattered a great deal, telling us (echoing Virginia Woolf) that ‘the private world of the family is not separate from the public sphere of politics and economics.’ I believe that her conclusions and indeed her statistics are basically right. But I base that judgment less on my faith in her ...”