Space Aria

Adam Mars-Jones: On Samantha Harvey, 8 February 2024

Orbital 
by Samantha Harvey.
Jonathan Cape, 136 pp., £14.99, November 2023, 978 1 78733 434 2
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... tension is not to be pumped up, how does an ensemble cast function in a novel? In The Waves Virginia Woolf also made use of six named though not freestanding characters, to embody an implied universe. Her approach was to build up a polyphonic texture, with the risk that the voices would become blurred, neither distinct nor blended, in the book’s ...

Lifted Up

Deborah Friedell: Pepys Deciphered, 25 December 2025

The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary 
by Kate Loveman.
Cambridge, 238 pp., £22, April 2025, 978 1 009 55411 4
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... a commercial success nevertheless and reissued throughout the 19th century. In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf confessed to disappointment: Evelyn was a ‘gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence’, but a diary ought to reveal ‘the secrets’ of the ‘heart’ and he’d written nothing that couldn’t have ‘been read aloud in the ...

Psychoapologetics

Frank Cioffi, 2 June 1983

Philosophical Essays on Freud 
edited by Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins.
Cambridge, 314 pp., £25, November 1982, 9780521240765
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The Legend of Freud 
by Samuel Weber.
Minnesota, 179 pp., $25, December 1982, 0 8166 1128 9
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... Schmidl’s argument are, fortunately, independent of the credibility of his particular example. Virginia Woolf, who came to read Freud’s account of the tablecloth compulsion because she was involved in publishing the English translation, commented: ‘We could all go on like this for hours, and yet these Germans think it proves something beside their ...

The Sense of the Self

Galen Strawson, 18 April 1996

... than in the case of Molly Bloom (who has none). There may be some difference between the sexes – Virginia Woolf claimed that Dorothy Richardson had ‘invented the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’ – but it is not normally so marked. Molly Bloom’s great flood of words resembles speech more than thought. Radical disjunction does not ...

Lemon and Pink

David Trotter: The Sorrows of Young Ford, 1 June 2000

Return to Yesterday 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Bill Hutchings.
Carcanet, 330 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 397 1
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War Prose 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Max Saunders.
Carcanet, 276 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 396 3
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... Museum, than brutally to crush the aspirations of any young person available for the purpose. Like Virginia Woolf, Ford asks where these abrupt and inexplicable furies came from. As Ford grew older, the beards confronting him altered in hue, if not always in attitude. The director of the sanatorium where he was fed on pork and ice-cream turns out to be ...

Cartwheels over Broken Glass

Andrew O’Hagan: Worshipping Morrissey, 4 March 2004

Saint Morrissey 
by Mark Simpson.
SAF, 224 pp., £16.99, December 2003, 0 946719 65 9
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The Smiths: Songs that Saved Your Life 
by Simon Goddard.
Reynolds/Hearn, 272 pp., £14.99, December 2002, 1 903111 47 1
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... personal universe of irony and embarrassment, English seaside humour, fairground grotesquerie and Virginia Woolf. Like the best pop stars, Morrissey has ordained a common ground for his fans and given them a way of feeling, including a capacity to feel special for having the wit to admire him. But don’t forget the songs That made you cry And the songs ...

Zoning Out and In

Christopher Tayler: Richard Ford, 30 November 2006

The Lay of the Land 
by Richard Ford.
Bloomsbury, 485 pp., £17.99, October 2006, 0 7475 8188 6
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... to erudition, mentioning as he does not only Keats and Emerson but also, directly or indirectly, Virginia Woolf, Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Aldous Huxley, Kierkegaard, Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Kafka, Theodore Roethke and, repeatedly, Henry James. By coincidence, the theme that holds the novel together is introduced on the opening page through ...

Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount: Tea with Sassoon, 7 August 2003

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 7156 2894 1
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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 526 pp., £30, April 2003, 0 7156 2971 9
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Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil 
by Peter Stansky.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09547 3
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... Sassoon here or elsewhere described him as strange, unknowable and, ah, oriental – except for Virginia Woolf, who characteristically called him ‘an underbred Whitechapel Jew’. To bring out the anti-semitism of the English haute bourgeoisie, all you needed to do was ask them for the weekend.In his opening chapters I began to think that Peter ...

Desperately Seeking Susan

Terry Castle: Remembering Susan Sontag, 17 March 2005

... rise again dramatically, ‘as soon as I am dead’. The same thing had happened, after all, to Virginia Woolf, and didn’t we agree Woolf was a great genius? In a weak-minded attempt at levity, I said: ‘Do you really think Orlando is a work of genius?’ She then exploded. ‘Of course not!’ she shouted, hands ...

Don’t Ask Henry

Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness, 9 October 2008

Belchamber 
by Howard Sturgis.
NYRB, 345 pp., £8.99, May 2008, 978 1 59017 266 7
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... outspokenly gay; it clearly wasn’t like the more liberated ‘atmosphere of buggery’ which Virginia Woolf so disliked around Lytton Strachey – ‘a tinkling, private, giggling, impression. As if I had gone in to a men’s urinal.’ Edith Wharton, a frequent guest at Qu’Acre, wouldn’t have liked that either. To the translator Gerard ...

Things Ill-Done and Undone

Helen Thaventhiran: T.S. Eliot’s Alibis, 8 September 2022

Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ 
by Robert Crawford.
Cape, 609 pp., £25, June, 978 0 224 09389 7
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... school-ma’amish female’; Ottoline Morrell called her that ‘awful American Woman’; for Virginia Woolf she was a ‘dull impeccable Bostonian’, a ‘rich American snob lady’. Eliot’s ardour, and the reasons for it, passed his contemporaries by.Crawford’s biography restores Eliot’s devotion to view while keeping its object shadowy. His ...
... eccentric and once-off usages of a different cultural stratum, those of writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce (except for most of Finnegans Wake); though virtually no recognition is offered of the problem of using literary sources as evidence for current usage. Unfortunately, the Supplement is not beyond ...

Death in Greece

Marilyn Butler, 17 September 1981

Byron’s Letter and Journals. Vol. XI: For Freedom’s Battle 
edited by Leslie Marchand.
Murray, 243 pp., £11.50, April 1981, 0 7195 3792 4
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Byron: The Complete Poetical Works 
edited by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 464 pp., £35, October 1980, 0 19 811890 2
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Red Shelley 
by Paul Foot.
Sidgwick, 293 pp., £12.95, May 1981, 0 283 98679 4
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Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile 
by Glauco Cambon.
Princeton, 360 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 691 06424 5
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... admirers is especially illuminating – Harriet Taylor, J.S. Mill, Olive Schreiner, Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf. Shelley’s modern reputation has too often suffered from the outmoded phrasing of his other 19th-century disciples, who saw him as a would-be religious idealist, a winsome child who was, as Francis Thompson put it, ‘gold-dusty with ...

Sister-Sister

Terry Castle, 3 August 1995

Jane Austen’s Letters 
edited by Deirde Le Faye.
Oxford, 621 pp., £30, March 1995, 0 19 811764 7
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... The letters from Austen that Cassandra allowed to survive testify to such a primordial bond. Virginia Woolf observed of Austen’s fiction that ‘it is where the power of the man has to be conveyed that her novels are always at their weakest.’ Perhaps this is because men are inevitably inferior to sisters. Even more so than in the fiction, Austen ...