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“... thing’ is Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, and I assume the faint pastiche of Virginia Woolf in Hazzard’s language is a homage to the era: the translation appeared between 1922 and 1930. Scott Moncrieff died in 1930, and the last volume was translated by Andreas Mayor. The whole work was substantially revised by Terence Kilmartin for an edition ...”

“... out two novels with Russian settings, spoke of Gerhardie with envy and admiration to Virginia Woolf, who seems herself to have implied an admission that he managed the new consciousness without drawing attention to it in the way she needed to do. At the same time, he did not sell. After Futility, which was in any case by no means a commercial success, he ...”

“... for example, Stephen Trombley’s dismally representative approach in his study of Virginia Woolf). For many years, the Cambridge stress on the private spirit – practical criticism is an example – helped to energise the study of literature and most critics would admit to having learnt from this informal procedure. Its weakness, however, lay in the ...”

“... to complain to people for whom ‘my works included me rather than I them’; and nor was Virginia Woolf. They have become themselves, whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A disillusioned ...”

“... Vengeance is represented here by Judit Torre, a mysterious beauty known as the ‘Chilean Virginia Woolf’, who is the leader of a group of female terrorists bent on killing a member of the security police. Mañungo falls under Judit’s spell and finds himself, within hours of his return, joining the scavengers and thugs lurking in the streets of a wealthy ...”

“... that emerged from it? The editing of these letters, under the careful eyes of Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate, is as superbly well done as it was in the first volume. This is not to say that the letters are great letters. Alas, no. The expense of reticence is boringness, and if you want literary gossip you’ll still have to go to Virginia ...”

“... Not many Johannesburg miners rejoice in the richly blooming confusion of their lives. Virginia Woolf saw the world as a bundle of vivid fragments, but one wonders if her gardener did. Perhaps Murdoch evolved against the grain of her age, starting off as a woman writer and ending up as a lady novelist. The latter title might also be reserved for Muriel ...”

“... as Wells, Shaw, Bennett, Jerome K. Jerome, Harley Granville-Barker, Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf. Britain shows that the society sponsored lectures on a broad spectrum of arts subjects (with literature predominating), provided a forum for sustained discussion of the relationship between art and politics, and spawned a range of cultural ...”

“... him and everything he felt he stood for. Leavis in 1956 was certainly disillusioned about Virginia Woolf, Auden, the Bloomsbury set in general, even Eliot. But what irritated Priestley was his rejection of the 18th-century novelists – Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Smollett – whom Priestley most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ‘felt ...”

“... 39 and unmarried, is staying at an-end-of-season hotel, on Lake Geneva. She looks like Virginia Woolf, but as ‘Vanessa Wilde’ writes moderately best-selling romances of the traditional, Georgette Heyer kind. She has resisted the urging of her agent to produce the more fashionable ‘bodice rippers’. It gradually emerges that Edith has been sent to ...”

“... have they gone, all these records I’ve had in my head for years, just in case Roy Plomley or Michael Parkinson or Sue Lawley or whoever used to do My Top Twelve on Radio One asked me in as a late and admittedly unknown replacement for somebody famous?’ And what was Rob’s killer move when he was in the process of getting to know Laura in the first ...”

“... of both thoughts. Mike Nichols, who directed Taylor and Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, once asked her whether it was ‘a pain in the ass’ being so beautiful and she replied: ‘I can’t wait for it to go.’ Her part as Martha (for which she won an Oscar) required her to gain weight and to be made up unflatteringly to look fifteen years ...”

“... it thought it still had. In this perspective many ambitious modern ventures – those of Proust, Woolf and Musil as well as Mann and Joyce – can be seen as inhabiting the ruins of a genre, reinventing life for a form ‘from which, as one knows, life has vanished’. Kafka is another story. The last great novel in the ruins is probably Perec’s aptly ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... study of Byron’s daughter Allegra, both issued in 1935. The latter was published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which led to her meeting with Virginia Woolf, whose diaries describe her as ‘tremulous’, ‘honest-eyed’ and very glamorous: ‘I like her bird of paradise flight through the gay world. A long ...”