“... he’s always been in favour of medical experiments.11 August. Neville Smith sends me a menu from Virginia Woolf’s, a restaurant and bar in the Russell Hotel, which tells prospective diners that Virginia Woolf was ‘a modernist writer’, a member of the Bloomsbury Group ‘which used to meet at 46 Gordon ...”

“... up house there in 1904. But he was not a hero. At the 1903 retrospective of his work Vanessa and Virginia decided that ‘some of his work, indeed most of it, is quite childlike.’ A break with the past had been made. Earlier still, a Papal line had been drawn which divided the artistic globe into a literary hemisphere, which was to be ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed ...”

“... memory of accompanying Elizabeth Bowen one morning to Tavistock Square when she was calling on Virginia Woolf. At one point in their chat Mrs Woolf produced a little ring-casket, a memento that she had received that morning from the estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell. This must have been, allowing for the usual delay ...”

“... she prostituted her art and ideals for the good name of the family. Years later, in 1917, he met Virginia Woolf at Heal’s. She wrote in her diary:we walked up and down a gallery discussing his aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward. The mystery of her character deepens: her charm and wit and character all marked as a woman, full of knowledge and humour – and then ...”

“... Russian novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and including Woolf, Edmund Wilson (‘No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was’) and V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which he is now published and read, and the ...”

“... intimates, the Webbs and Wells, and had a joky intimacy with persons as diverse as Lady Astor, Virginia Woolf and the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was sporadically in touch, affectionate and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw the ...”

“... This is only partly true. It seems to me that they have used the originals for fiction in English (Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield etc), and to a certain extent published translations for French fiction (Colette but not always Balzac), and for medical literature (Stekel’s Frigidity in Woman is quoted correctly), and sometimes, but not always, for ...”

“... list offers different kinds of clues to what she’s up to. Early on she attends a lecture on ‘Virginia Woolf and Time’, and a little flag is raised to remind us that the novel we are reading is also playing with the idea that there is one kind of time ‘that could be measured by clocks and another kind’. She launches into a disquisition on how ...”

“... rapidly squandered by her dreadful father – that ‘gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man’, as Virginia Woolf would call him – who had long since run through the £20, 000 lottery prize Mary had won as a child. Dr Mitford continued to batten on his daughter and she continued to be pressed for money, but the small cottage they shared at Three Mile ...”

“... and biographers moved quickly to dispel Murry’s hagiographical embellishments. We now know that Virginia Woolf thought that Mansfield ‘stinks like a – well civet cat that had taken to street walking’; that Bertrand Russell found her discussions of people ‘envious, dark and full of alarming penetration in discovering ... whatever was bad in ...”

“... thinking that led up to this – I asked Christie to talk on a writer I knew he deeply admired, Virginia Woolf. He arrived on his bicycle, and, as I recall the occasion, he read extensively from her writings. The restlessness with which he read made it clear why he admired her. He said at the time, and in a letter in the present volume he makes the ...”

“... fount, cover design, price – everything. It is a heady freedom such as Baldesar Castiglione and Virginia Woolf enjoyed – you have become your own patron. But then after you’ve checked the galleys, read the proofs and had the book bound, your first edition will be delivered, and as I have said, this is when reality comes home to roost. Twenty-two ...”

“... George Duckworth. Duckworth is now chiefly remembered as the half-brother who regularly molested Virginia Woolf and was pilloried in her memoirs as a ‘man of pure convention’. From 1892 to 1902 he was Charles Booth’s unpaid private secretary and in his early twenties was a whirlwind of energy. He walked every police beat in the metropolitan ...”

“... score or so boys that made up Albion House school. We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell; Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the ...”