“... and Connolly are targets for the hardest knocks in the book. The stories come in various sizes. Virginia Woolf called Isaiah Berlin a ‘violent Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the effect that at his funeral or synagogue memorial service an earwitness friend of mine heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree that the service had gone well ...”

“... of writers can often seem so unbearably silly in the light of our expectations. We think Virginia Woolf should sound like her style, but she doesn’t: in her British Library recording (the only one in existence), she sounds like a person imprisoned by her sensibility and her class as opposed to someone who floats somewhere above it. ...”

“... of mind over body’ was clearly prepared for the experiment. The bravura sentence that opens Virginia Woolf’s haunting essay, On Being Ill, contends that sickness is too rarely a subject of literature: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the ...”

“... Lovers, the book strikes many young readers as a chestnut, maybe even an obstacle on the road to Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon and Alice Walker, while the later novels just look ‘weird’. On the one hand, the author of Women in Love is too damn serious, too damn end-of-the-world to be any fun in a world of MTV; on the other hand, the creator of The ...”

“... priggish about the cinema. ‘A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness,’ Virginia Woolf complained in 1926, and the feeling persists. Even the best images won’t do. The scene in Iris that everyone seems to like most has her in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, tearing blank pages from her notebook and pinning them to the beach ...”

“... of feminist criticism, which receives one rather surly reference. American feminist critics of Virginia Woolf, while praiseworthy in developing new vantage points on her work (that’s Taylor being charitable again), have ended up waging an ‘ideological crusade’. He is not himself, need one say, an ideological critic: he is a card-carrying ...”

“... In​ 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing ...”

“... hours alone. They can wear anything – or nothing – and nobody is any the wiser. Yet as Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando, clothes have ‘more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’ In the novel clothes propel the narrative of Orlando’s passage through time and ...”

“... I learned about the first from a New York Times review of Hermione Lee’s 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf. In the midst of Daphne Merkin’s somewhat dutiful praise there erupts a moment of real excitement: Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as Ms ...”

“... it. The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace editions appeared at the same time, both produced under Woolf’s direction, although from different proofs. There are some minor, though not insignificant, differences between the two. As E.F. Shields puts it in her exhaustive essay on ‘The American Edition of Mrs Dalloway’ (1974), ‘both … can legitimately ...”

“... pages long, who have complained that it is boringly avant-garde, inchoate, and vitiated by what Virginia Woolf called ‘the damned egotistical self’. It was not just perversity which provoked her to court such charges. She set out to write a novel about ‘the startling things that are not important’, and to do so through the experiences of a ...”

“... of the moralist. The sybarite – for there was a distinct touch of that in his nature, and Virginia Woolf twitted him for dining with duchesses – might think our lives peculiar, but he could not resist the variety of human nature. Raymond was undoubtedly at his best when writing for the New Statesman, because he liked swimming against the ...”

“... of royalties and rights. The Siren’s Song contains a slight but relatively accessible essay on Virginia Woolf, a welcome recruit so far as Blanchot is concerned because of the ordeals of premeditation which are recorded in her diaries. She was a sufferer, one of the neurasthenic élite, whose suicide, he chillingly maintains, ‘vindicated her ...”

“... that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void. Virginia Woolf was almost right: all one really needs is a car of one’s own, the funds to keep it on the road and the will to encounter oneself within. Though most of those men aren’t listening to ...”