“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... motive for producing books has worried almost everyone who has discussed Mrs Oliphant’s writing. Virginia Woolf cited her as an example of a woman who had ‘prostituted her culture’ in order to earn her living; an Edinburgh Reviewer pronounced that she had ‘deliberately reduced herself ... to a manufacturer of saleable literature’, and had no ...”

“... observes). It is still something of a gentleman’s library – at least, that is how it feels. Virginia Woolf did not dislike the London Library as much as Trinity College Library, whose male exclusivity provoked A Room of One’s Own. But she would not serve on the London Library Committee, feeling that they were ‘sniffy about women’ and hers ...”

“... people fail to recognise his greatness, and value him less than, say, James, Conrad, Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, is because they miss his depths, they cannot fathom them unless they present in a frontal, full-dress form.’ It is a matter for regret or possibly indignation that this sentence, absurd in almost every possible way, should have escaped the ...”

“... of this chronological argument are reflections on the ways in which ‘the little language’ (as Virginia Woolf called it) of each play works. Shakespeare’s mature dramas are underwritten by ‘matrices’ of repeating words and themes (here Kermode draws on Empson’s Structure of Complex Words): ‘In these echoing words and themes, these ...”