“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as he chronicles its rise. At the Invalids match at Rodmell at the end of that August, he spots Virginia Woolf among the spectators. In fact, Woolf rather liked the game and had enjoyed playing it as a girl, but she couldn’t abide Squire, a writer and editor, and his gang: ‘Happily we had fine weather; and sat in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of pluralism has many virtues, but I am not sure that structure or organisation are among them. Virginia Woolf wondered at the absence of well-managed transitions in Autumn Journal and put it down to MacNeice watching too many films. Eliot’s uneasiness about pluralism is, like Arnold’s, an uneasiness about order; and he associated its modern form ...”

“... were interrupted from time to time by some quite straightforward piece of information, as in Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941): ‘One of the foremost experimenters with the technique and form of the novel. She was a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group among whom many new artistic ideas were discussed.’ After reading ...”

“... set up a studio with Yanko Varda, and became close friends with Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, all of whom spent time in Cassis during those years. Through Max Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced ...”

“... realism, she was largely impervious to the avant-garde experiments of writers like Joyce or Woolf. Nor, for all her bleakness, was she interested in conveying that spirit of sophisticated cultural malaise and psychosexual malfunction so palpable in Hemingway or Fitzgerald. As Acocella puts it, Cather went on giving readers ‘stories about noble-minded ...”

“... beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’. In The Years, written on the eve of fascism, Virginia Woolf treads similar ground. She is commenting on the dire consequences of parental exclusivity, on the damage it does to the social fabric – which was on the point of being rent beyond repair – to think it right to put your child, your ...”

“... He examined the books I was carrying (a collection of Edwin Muir’s essays, of which he approved; Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, at which he wrinkled his nose) and asked me to come for a drink at six that evening, before moving off towards Clare Old Court with a curiously sideways walk that made him look as though he were being gently pulled away from ...”

“... keeps the narrative going, however unbalanced the judgments become. In fact, Keynes and Leonard Woolf, the only politically active members of Bloomsbury, were always very strongly anti-Communist, particularly Woolf, and that sinister upwards and downwards movement is a mere fever of fantasy, as those of us old enough to ...”