“... 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 ...”

“... of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects of the leading ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... type, well-liked at school and able to move easily between Bloomsbury and Chelsea. Although Virginia maybe condescended somewhat, he knew that she was very fond of him. But then, everybody was. And it was not as if he really wanted to write book reviews. In 1905, after Eton and Cambridge (where he served as an Apostle under G.E. Moore and thus first ...”

“... century saw a decisive break with the values of the Victorian era, the assumption expressed in Virginia Woolf’s celebrated hyperbole that ‘in or about December 1910, human character changed’. Those intellectuals whom we still find it convenient to refer to as ‘Bloomsbury’ may have paraded their revolt against Victorian parents and ...”

“... to be in the least charming, but some of her crisis sayings have the bite of the best of, say, Virginia Woolf or the early Germaine Greer. French’s thesis is that the modern cultures, at least since the invention of agriculture, are and have been engaged in a systematic war against women. Women have been repressed, abused and enslaved, and continue ...”

“... representative of the state of society. Rather surprisingly, given its reputation for waftiness, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) is the exception that proves the rule. Woolf followed Gissing and James in exploring the specific duration (or durations) of travel by underground railway. Indeed, she went further, in ...”

“... and placed in new arrangements. What was done when we weren’t looking? They are ready for Woolf’s travesty of a biography, where ‘all the little figures – for they are rather under life size – will begin to move and speak, and we will arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant.’What is strange about such images isn’t ...”

“... and had just published her engrossing and formally innovative memoir Childhood (1983). Surely Virginia Woolf’s analysis applies here: in a sexist society, the arbiters of taste simply can’t help thinking that books dealing with war are more important than a book that ‘deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room’. Or, in this case: a ...”