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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... artists as well as thinkers. After Dickens, as it were, the weather took a turn for the worse, as Virginia Woolf recorded in Orlando: ‘The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the 19th century stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering ...”

“... have been hard going. Clive Bell found Eliot’s ‘studied primness’ deliciously comic, and Virginia Woolf was a great tease. But this was his chosen milieu, and although Eliot could call himself ‘Metoikos’ (meaning ‘exile’) as late as 1945, he had obviously acquired the censorious Bloomsbury habit. Russell, he discovered, ‘has a ...”

“... Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom of teenage ...”

“... world, where the laws of time are suspended, and yet which is still my own’. Reviewing Lee’s Virginia Woolf book in 1996, Fitzgerald wrote that as a biographer she is ‘calm, patient, strong, deeply interested and interesting’, and her book ‘wonderfully fluid [and] imaginative … every chapter [with] its own pattern’. The present ...”

“... inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitious for ...”

“... Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady deigned to acknowledge the other.) And not long ago I met an elderly female couple – two very elegant Syrian women – who had lived for many years in Paris on the rue Jacob, across from the ...”

“... as everyone rushed home to describe the occasion for posterity. Following one such meeting Virginia Woolf duly noted her impression of the tall young man: ‘A loose-jointed mind, misty, clouded, suffusive.’ This doesn’t seem too wide of the mark, especially if one thinks that a certain loose-jointedness may be a merit in a poet’s ...”

“... For almost a hundred years Ivan Ilyich had few literary followers. Forty years on, in 1926, Virginia Woolf noted how astonishing it was that ‘illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. What could be more weighty? In illness ‘we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of ...”

“... is a long way from the prose commonly associated with Nabokov, poetic prose whose oppressiveness Virginia Woolf reluctantly stigmatised in ‘Impassioned Prose’, where she evokes Laurence Binyon’s remark that ‘poetical prose has but a bastard kind of beauty, easily appearing overdressed.’ Nabokov, it should be said, is not entirely immune to ...”