“... out, I not only have many different selves, but I am often, as they say, not myself at all.’ In Virginia Woolf’s remarkable ‘A Sketch of the Past’, drafted as she wrote her biography of Roger Fry, the gap between narrating and narrated selves – ‘the two people, I now, I then’ – proves recalcitrant and persistent, refusing to close. In any ...”

“... It can also be seen as a pessimistic companion-piece to A Room of One’s Own, a riposte to Woolf somewhat influenced by the work of Our Lady of Straw, Camille Paglia. Our discoveries of female poets of the past, Greer claims, are not real discoveries. The women writers who have been picked up will soon be put down again. Seldom do they have any lasting ...”

“... job question is quite serious enough. I remember in my first term we were reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and the leader of the class (it always had a specific leader, just as it would now in Communist China) came and said: ‘We think we had better not write an essay on Mrs Dalloway, because it might have political implications.’ I hadn’t ...”

“... for the moment, the wisdom of looking to Spokane for anything at all), we hear the voice of Virginia Woolf, who wrote to her sister Vanessa in 1928 on hearing from Eliot of his conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has ...”

“... dictionary and its supplements, satirically underscored by the lament of Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas that ‘it is much to be regretted that no lives of maids . . . are to be found’. In the 63 volumes published by 1901, only about 4 per cent of subjects are female, and even the most recent supplementary volume (on the ...”

“... whimsical that never quite coheres. As Harris explains, she has taken much of her inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a hard act to follow and not always a helpful influence. Harris describes her own approach in the introduction as having ‘tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it’. It’s an ...”

“... female ethos. It’s in the Oxford Street Debenhams, which had been Marshall & Snelgrove, that Virginia Woolf’s Orlando finds herself in her last manifestation on 11 October 1928. Having travelled through time, she enters from the crowded street and the essence of department store joy comes over her. ‘Shade and scent enveloped her. The present ...”

“... from a striking snapshot of the Twenties or Thirties, showing Eliot blocked off by a towering Virginia Woolf from a cowering Vivien. The trouble with this insistence on actuality is that in practice the source-materials continually resisted the interpretation imposed on them. The play’s numb hero could never have written a line, and the action ...”

“... This suits Amis fine – but it does give rise to certain questions about knowledge: like Virginia Woolf, Amis elides authorial free-ranging intelligence with the restricted reactions of the protagonist, and it is often hard to see where one becomes the other. Would an amnesiac think of cars as ‘daredevil roadsters’ or invent the elaborately ...”

“... gave me the greatest trouble.’ But it may be that the greatest trouble lay elsewhere. In 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister:I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I ...”

“... A bolt-eyed, blue-shirted, shock headed hatless man ... ‘Mrs Woolf? ... I’m Graves.’ He appeared to have been rushing through the air at sixty miles an hour and to have alighted temporarily ... The poor boy is all emphasis, protestation and pose. He has a crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ...”

“... the reconstruction by a literary scholar of the path to modern realism, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a ...”

“... prompted to recall wrathfully how long it had taken to reach this small ledge of independence: ‘Virginia’s Room of One’s Own irritates me; and I have wanted to tell her that I have never had £500 a year of private (unearned) income or anything like it, and that I have never had a room of my own except a bedroom at a Lausanne pension for a month where I ...”

“... people’ experience. The sex is gross, but the box is ticked; Paul wants to try everything. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl initially seems relatively conventional: its protagonist is a non-realist semi-superhero, yes, but he moves through an otherwise realist world. About thirty pages in, however, the novel seems ...”

“... intervals of affection and going through the motions, the marriage resembles Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? turned into a high-shriek miniseries. They separated in 1963, after ‘that fucker’s’ windfall from Portnoy’s Complaint. Then, one night in 1968, Maggie was killed in an accident when the friend driving her, speeding through Central ...”