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“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... disappears from the history of the central character, just as Shakespeare’s sister (pace Virginia Woolf) disappeared from history. It’s a masterstroke of Jane Gardam’s to bag the role for a 20th-century woman, daughter of a sea-captain drowned in 1904 on the coal run to Belfast. This is the year when the novel opens. Motherless Polly, soon ...”

“... set much of a standard. This was not entirely their fault. They gave themselves airs, certainly. Virginia Woolf considered her musings about the war to be a ‘whiff of shot in the cause of freedom’. Elizabeth Bowen was even more grandiloquent: ‘Wartime writing is in a sense resistance writing.’ But in fact their subject and the attitude they were ...”

“... envisage the curious achievement of Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones, you must first imagine that Virginia Woolf has rewritten Lord of the Flies. Interior monologues and painfully acute perceptions of a seaside landscape combine to colour in what is essentially a tale of a group of girls wrecked on a desert island. The fact that the desert island is just ...”

“... Thoby’s funeral: he caught typhoid while on holiday in Greece with Vanessa and his other sister, Virginia.) It was at Cambridge that Bell first embraced the character he later described as the ‘English boy born with fine sensibility, a peculiar feeling for art, or an absolutely first-rate intelligence’ who inevitably ‘finds himself, from the outset, at ...”

“... upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,’ Virginia Woolf asserted. Aphra Behn (c. 1640-89) was the first Englishwoman to make her living ‘by her pen’, as we used to say. Now, nobody makes her – or his – living by the phallic and virile pen. Linguistic and cultural structures no longer ...”

“... are told, the Woolfs had hot chocolate in a tea-shop, before buying a looking-glass. At Saulieu, Virginia Woolf, writing after ‘the most delicious luncheon of her life’ in the company of Vita Sackville-West, foresaw ‘that if we stay here for two days eating caneton en croûte and crème double, washed down by Bourgogne mousseux, we shall get ...”

“... It was a rare lyric moment for James, who was a pure scientist. Phyllis had responded by quoting Virginia Woolf, although she did not know it. Not stopping her mop, she had said: ‘Something always has to be done next.’ ‘Meet me,’ croaked James, ‘at the Bureau of Birth, Death and Matrimony. Half-past nine next Saturday morning.’ To sum up he ...”

“... contrast between ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ could not be bolder. But Christina, in the words of Virginia Woolf, was no ‘pure saint’. As a poet, she used her writing to examine what was unbearable, even unreasonable, about her own restraint. If the brother carries the renegade part of the family on the surface, the sister bears her share of it in ...”

“... exhibits” of the future’, a phrase that Douglas Goldring used to dismiss Joyce, Woolf, Eliot and other authors whose books crammed her shelves. But Butts could judge herself just as harshly: ‘Up to now,’ she noted in 1927, ‘I am an unsuccessful writer, lover, dubious mother, of no social distinction – well liked, but my looks are ...”

“... of eurythmic dancing who had been translating his early poems into German.In 1925 Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press brought out two slim volumes: Edwin Muir’s First Poems appeared in April, and Willa Muir’s Women: An Inquiry a few weeks later. Modern feminists have been put off by Willa’s belief that women’s ‘creative ...”

“... is its cantankerous letters,’ or ‘One of the happiest events for the Lit Supp in 1916 was Virginia Woolf’s return in the spring to health, and to its reviewing team.’ Nevertheless, this history, while locally numbing, is cumulatively quite stimulating. Something will come of nothing: the book review does have a history, even if it turns out ...”

“... from St Pancras to the North? No answers show on the blank faces of the sitters (we must exclude Virginia Woolf from the charge of blankness – she looks merely irritable). The mothers, who had passed lists of Suitable and Unsuitable Young Men to their daughters at the Season’s start, and had warned by means of the initials NSIT (Not Safe In ...”

“... narrative of any chance of resolution? Flynn has listed Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among her influences, but closer to hand we have David Fincher’s own earlier films, especially The Game and Seven, even The Social Network. He is drawn to, and expert at depicting, modes of manipulation and uncertainty, zones where ...”

“... own. He added: ‘I know of course that you would not agree to this.’ He was right, but so was Virginia Woolf. ‘A sturdy figure,’ she wrote in 1918, ‘& a fat decided clever face.’ The Dulwich exhibition, curated by Boyd Haycock, is varied and incoherent, a little like a posthumous degree show. It’s almost awkwardly clear from the first room ...”