“... of her books. She only engages with the most irreproachable writers: Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. The only constitutive human relationship is to the partner, a shadowy figure, a troubadour’s muse. For a writer who so wonderfully emerged in such a flurry of strife and conflict, it has all gone quiet and comfy, surely, a bit like those ...”

“... don’t consider that the self they are now was there in the past or shall be there in the future. Virginia Woolf and Bob Dylan occupy this slot, along with Strawson himself, who believes that ‘as a whole human being’ he exists continuously over time, but that his self, by which he means the way he experiences himself to be now, is not the same as his ...”

“... Look within,’ Virginia Woolf said, but she wasn’t thinking of brain surgery. Memories of Amnesia is a black joke about inner landscapes, or more precisely, about a mind turned inside out. Subjectivity, that spreading territory of so much modern writing, becomes a sort of intellectual circus, an arena where hectic and unanswerable arguments cross like missiles in the night ...”

“... actors are not, so to speak, up to the technology, a point noted with characteristic sharpness by Virginia Woolf in a letter to Hughes. ‘It’s full of remarkable things. What I’m not sure is whether they coalesce ... on the one hand there’s the storm: on the other the people. And between them there’s a gap, in which there’s some want of ...”

“... like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over a posh dinner than sit at home and read a new novel by Jack ...”

“... She is just the opposite, in other words, of the other great woman Modernist she knew, Virginia Woolf, for whom diary-writing, notes and letters – all the words that form the hinterland of the books themselves – were an intimate part of the creative process. Living and writing merge for Woolf, she lives ...”

“... one of her essays on biography, “Lives of the Obscure”,’ Cohen notes in the preface, Virginia Woolf writes that ‘one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost … waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom.’ This romance has its appeal. I ...”

“... modern when in fact it belongs to a long line of books by women about what and how women think. Virginia Woolf pursued with interest the fiction produced by Dorothy Richardson, a rival annotator or recorder of female consciousness. Pilgrimage, Richardson’s semi-autobiographical novel series, is built out of what ...”

“... unread founder of women’s writing, the figure who had been hymned but effectively dismissed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,’ Woolf wrote, only to declare ...”

“... to a dead wife. But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made ...”

“... Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be ...”

“... gaiety’, or, as Frederic Harrison put it, ‘a story of rank cruelty and almost insanity’. Virginia Woolf agreed, speaking of the ‘almost insane religious mania of the father’. This, without question, was a book about the grim oppression of a life-denying father and the admirable resilience of a persecuted son. Father and Son was the only book ...”

“... must have come partly from having an illegitimate child, excruciatingly humiliating in her day. Virginia Woolf, another sharp-eyed lady, wrote that all West’s difficulty came from ‘the weals and scars left by the hoofmarks of Wells’. (She also had comments about dirty nails and so on; Rebecca, for her part, would not ‘have fed a dog’ from one ...”

“... imported feathers from China. Everyone waited to see if he’d give in to his mother’s wishes. Virginia Woolf, Julian’s aunt, wrote that he was ‘dog obstinate’, ‘his mouth and face much tenser, as if he had been thinking in solitude’. One evening, according to his younger brother, Quentin,there was a meal at Charleston eaten by Vanessa, we ...”

“... Russian soul – ‘its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness’, as Virginia Woolf put it. Though there were some who mocked the craze for transplanted Russian soul-speak, most handbooks for fledgling Russophiles 100 years ago took it for granted that readers needed briefing on the paradox-filled Slavic temperament. ‘There ...”