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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abuse among her charges) and has an English degree: at least one passage brings a pleasing echo of Virginia Woolf, when she reflects that regretting the past is to deny ‘the whole thickness, allness, impossible complexity of the present moment, the density yet fragility, is that it, yes’. It was a dream of modernism that everything could be expressed ...”

“... poems of the 1930s, all set outside England and titled individually ‘New Hampshire’, ‘Virginia’, ‘Usk’, ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ and ‘Cape Ann’, prepare the way for the much better-known English and American-titled poems collected as Four Quartets: ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little ...”

“... writers, even if they happen to be male. The most sensible words on this issue remain those of Virginia Woolf in 1918: ‘The work of Miss Burney, the mother of English fiction, was not inspired by any single wish redress a grievance ... To take no more thought of their sex when they [the fore-mothers] wrote than of the colour of their eyes was one of ...”

“... starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews called Camelot, an advertisement for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There is a row of books from the time: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. On every side you can hear Kennedy’s voice: ‘Let the word go ...”

“... if I would write a preface for one of her books I could not have been more flattered had she been Virginia Woolf herself and I was soon eating out of her hand. Once the request was made I knew there was no refusing, saying that the only woman I had come across with a will of comparable iron was Miss Shepherd. Thereafter Debo signed all her letters to me ...”

“... this is a more fully embodied version of George and Martha’s fantasy son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – is also obviously wrong. It’s not just that the narrator is troubled by odd gaps in her ‘memory’ of Xavier’s earlier years, asking herself ‘was it normal for a mother to be so unreflective?’, in a way that makes no sense if ...”