“... were it not that elsewhere he shows himself capable of the most brusque judgment: ‘Leonard Woolf once remarked that T.S. Eliot was “only slightly anti-semitic”. I am reminded of that wise physician, Sir Adolph Abrahams, who, on his ward-rounds at Westminster, forbade medical students to utter the word “slightly”. “Either a woman is pregnant ...”

“... all his early volumes of poetry was a sign of his good connections, and the fact that Leonard Woolf arranged for the release of a limited, more luxurious edition of 100 copies of The Magnetic Mountain, signed by the author, indicates one of the ways in which political idealism and commercial shrewdness could promote each other in the publishing conditions ...”

“... of case studies, from Sara Coleridge’s translation in the 1840s of a chorus in the Agamemnon to Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ and H.D.’s Hippolytus Temporises (1927). Assiduous in the archives, she writes well about the manuscripts she has found – describing layout, textual variants, working use – and reconstructs, to ...”

“... of the picture with his pointer, half-obscuring the image with his amusing conceits on it. In Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘Mr Forster has been apt to pervade his books like a careful hostess who is anxious to introduce, to explain, to warn her guests of a step here, of a draught there.’ From one or two remarks in his diaries, it seems Forster ...”

“... like these made up words, ze and zir, and that sort of thing,’ he said in one interview.) Virginia Woolf’s use of ‘they’ and ‘their’ to mark Orlando’s transformation from man to woman – ‘Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity ...”

“... used to do, the only hold-ups when, as seldom, one of her subjects confessed to a fondness for Virginia Woolf or Dickens, both of which provoked a lively (and lengthy) discussion. There were many who hoped for a similar meeting of minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said ...”

“... been asked to apply.) The talk had to do with the war and writers of the 1920s – Wyndham Lewis, Woolf, the Sitwells. I showed slides of Claud Lovat Fraser’s sad little trench-drawings and expressed, all too dotingly, my love for them. I even mentioned (obliquely) Uncle Newton. It was not a success. The department Medusa – a steely Queer Theorist in ...”

“... Marsh and Parsons, the estate agent on Kensington Park Road. ‘Nothing was simply one thing,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, but nowhere is ever one place, either. The joy and the trouble with North Kensington is that no type and no tribe ever had it to themselves. Many people love that, but for others it’s part of the inequality that divides the ...”