“... 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 ...”

“... Klaus wrote an essay proposing that ‘hundreds, thousands of intellectuals follow the examples of Virginia Woolf, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig, Jan Masaryk. A suicide wave among the world’s most distinguished minds.’ Soon afterwards he took his own life. In his final years Heinrich kept in touch with many of Nelly’s friends in Germany. In Los ...”

“... between a speech of drunken dissatisfaction from Martha in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian ...”

“... itself, began.’ Hollinghurst is not a companionable writer, and the moment doesn’t ring true. Virginia Woolf would have risked the intimate sententious parenthesis, but she would also have prepared for it. The conventional family-saga ground plan, laid out but not built on, is a particularly puzzling feature of the new book. The past retains its ...”

“... An equally soft-spoken authority called Houston Baker, on record as saying that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is ‘no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza’, and that his ‘career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards’, can nowadays be elected President of the MLA. It seems evident ...”

“... biography. Thurman’s life can easily slide in alongside Hermione Lee’s recent biography of Virginia Woolf as a somewhat unlooked-for end-of-century masterwork, being vital, absorbing, delectably written and psychologically astute beyond anything anyone had any right to expect, especially given the mass of books (many excellent) already devoted to ...”

“... always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great Russians ‘were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways’. Natasha’s Dance contains ...”

“... socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy for picking up girls my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless. I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste ...”

“... They were tired of Hemingway, very slow to warm up to Faulkner and conventionally dismissive of Virginia Woolf. Rahv, 1943: ‘There is a crucial fault even in Mrs Woolf’s grasp of [the tradition of English poetry and of the poetic sensibility], for she comprehends it one-sidedly, and perhaps in much too feminine a ...”

“... old silver’ school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V. Woolf, K.A.P. [Katherine Anne Porter], Bowen, R. West etc – they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first – and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to ...”

“... Immediately after becoming a woman, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando returns from a spell as Ambassador Extraordinary in Constantinople for tea and literary gossip with Addison, Pope and Swift – only to find that her pleasure in their company dissipates when the volatile Pope turns the force of his anger against her ...”

“... its front page. Her extraordinary fame has also led to this extraordinary completeness. Maybe only Virginia Woolf’s diaries are comparable as a record of a woman becoming the writer she hoped but wasn’t sure she could be, though Woolf’s legend is different.Plath grows up in Cold War America, deceived by a God who ...”