“... 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 ...”

“... has not found much to say about de la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or ...”

“... 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 ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of ...”

“... was altogether different. ‘I imagine it is here that civilisation will expire,’ he writes to Virginia Woolf in 1916. Forster was little inclined to hold forth in generalities, but for him as for D.H. Lawrence (whose banned Rainbow he is defending in his last English letter before Alexandria) the destruction and dislocation of the war entailed a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... T.S. Eliot’s. In the 1890s his stories appeared in the Bodley Head quarterly The Yellow Book and Virginia Woolf later wrote cattily about his wife. A career as a minor modernist was there for the taking, but too close an association with late Victorian Balliol men meant that he had to settle for a life as a colonial ...”

“... like to admit; they would all agree, for instance, along with Leavis, to a marked suspicion of Virginia Woolf, for interestingly similar reasons. All three men tend to write journalism which, at least when it is stalking the common reader, functions at levels below their best intelligence. Carey quickly becomes coarse and crowd-pleasing; Eagleton ...”

“... Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and sub-genres: the Chester-Belloc style of essay writing is caricatured in Egbert Merrymarsh, and there is a postgraduate sherry-party ...”

“... with the possibility of dispersal and destruction: a fact seized upon with great intensity by both Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon, and explicitly seen by Walter Benjamin as the essence of the Modernist revolution, an insight which makes Benjamin, even today, Modernism’s most profound theorist. Unlike Braque, Picasso always needed to violate his own ...”

“... Busk’), about Busk’s love affair with a writer called Vilde Winther (a deliberate allusion to Virginia Woolf). Linneberg’s novel, which – unsurprisingly – is rather more sympathetic to its hero, presents Vilde/Ida as an admirable but neurotic, unpredictable creature, whom the narrator can neither control nor fully understand. Hjorth ...”

“... intellectuals – their many devotees included William Gladstone, Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. (A hand-reader pronounced Wilde’s head line ‘very strongly marked, showing extraordinary brain power and profound scholarship’.) The high-end chirologists advertised distinctions between what they ...”

“... 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 ...”