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“... like a person about to break down – infinitely scrupulous, tautologous & cautious.’ Virginia Woolf writes in hers that he is ‘peevish, plaintive, egotistical’. The question of whether he will or won’t leave the bank is intolerably protracted, the drama of ill-health (his own, but more especially Vivien’s) seems as if it will never reach a fifth ...”

“... who read about Brooke in the papers knew nothing of this, and nothing of his charm and beauty (Leonard Woolf: ‘His looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was ...”

“... century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of images, not unlike the jumble of impressions in The Waste Land. But, as Trotter then ...”

“... this moment, 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 ...”

“... guiding us to the appropriately gendered toilet. During the 1914-18 war, the Fabian socialist Leonard Woolf spoke in praise of the largely voluntary international organisations that had given the world standards of length, weight, colour, electrical resistance and agricultural produce; he celebrated an ‘international commission for unifying the ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... were obviously not felt or acted on in the same way by, say, Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf. Emotions in history are neither chronologically stable nor socially homogeneous, even in the moments when they are universally felt, as in London under the German air-raids, and their intellectual representations even less so. How can they be compared or ...”

“... of the north and east. By the time of independence in 1948, some British administrators (including Leonard Woolf) had expressed anxiety lest the political power concentrated in the hands of the majority Sinhalese should lead them to ignore the distinct needs and interests of the minorities: but none foresaw the abruptness with which the balance of ...”

“... published 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 ...”

“... Stracheys galore had staffed the Raj throughout the 19th century, and Lytton’s dearest friend Leonard Woolf had just gone out to Ceylon. But here as in so many departments of life, the wind of change was blowing through Bloomsbury. From 1912 onwards, it was possible not only to talk openly of semen and atheism but also to ridicule the empire as an ...”

“... opinion, college was all about. ‘Who’s your father?’ he asked Madeleine. ‘Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?’ ‘In my case,’ Madeleine said, ‘my father really is my father.’ ‘Then you have to kill him.’ ‘Who’s your father?’ ‘Godard,’ he said. To ‘find out what everyone else was talking about’, Madeleine enrols in ...”

“... brother of someone so famous and well-loved, but Cecil was convinced he’d been overlooked: Leonard Woolf noted the streak of ‘fanatical intolerance’ nourished by a ‘grudge against the universe, the world and you in particular’. Beginning as a Fabian socialist under the mentorship of Hubert Bland, Cecil came out in favour of the Boer War ...”

“... sensuelle, unashamed, with nothing very noble or sensitive to commend her. The Diary of Virginia Woolf it is not. But she preserves for us the street vitality of a certain time and place. Ah, Bohemia ... when artists lived in garrets, wore corduroys and beards, had sardonic eyes and struck attitudes: ‘Bloody useless – bloody virgin too ... of course if ...”

“... Lenare was founded in 1924 by Leonard Green, whose portrait baptises this collection of society photographs. Facing him is an Unknown Woman, captured at the War’s end in an inverted pigeon’s nest and furs: she was presumably the first and certainly the last unknown woman to confront his lens. Lenare wanted fame and wealth to pose for him, and they did ...”

“... of the 19th, were equally unsuccessful in their Utopian endeavours, for reasons well summarised by Leonard Elmhirst, founder of Dartington Hall School: ‘they disregarded sound economics, they followed some ethical or theoretical principle too rigorously, or they attempted to isolate themselves too completely from the social and economic world around ...”