“... 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 ...”

“... we can’t enter and can’t replicate. In this sense he takes us back to the effect of film that Virginia Woolf flagged when she said that in moving pictures ‘we see life as it is when we have no part in it,’ and the one Stanley Cavell evokes when he speaks of films as presenting a world that is complete without us, a world we seek both to deny and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... skull for a face. Gwen Raverat – a Cambridge institution, granddaughter of Darwin and friend of Virginia Woolf and Stanley Spencer – doesn’t suit all this drama, and the 18 Raverats that were bequeathed to the college, paintings and woodcuts of Grantchester and Newnham and a drawing of swans, are confined to a small meeting room off the entrance ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... friends want, and it doesn’t quite seem to be art either. Rather than focusing on the novels of Virginia Woolf, as agreed with her thesis adviser, the narrator finds herself captivated by the five volumes of Woolf’s diaries, whose covers show various personal items found on her desk: ‘Notebooks lying open ...”

“... clings to these bedizened figures, however powerful. In 1938, in her furious essay Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf denounced peacockery as a display of unearned prerogatives and male authority, but her shafts also tilt at the indecency of such self-pleased exhibitionism. There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and ...”

“... with fiction. It is possible to walk around that square hundreds of times, as I have, knowing that Virginia Woolf was here, that Dorothy Sayers lived close by, noting the blue plaque to Hilda Doolittle, without detecting a feminist circuit. Unless you are Wade, whose investigations led her to an abundance of interesting residents. She considered writing ...”

“... raffinement d’un autre âge, et ce luxe discret que les Anglais appellent confort’. Virginia Woolf was less impressed when she stayed for tea: ‘2 dirty footmen to hand anchovy sandwiches, which I loathe and so had to put in my bag. When asked for a match by Baring I handed him a sandwich.’ He had, however, begun to suffer from ...”

“... found) in the early 1970s. Her topics included writers and fictional characters: the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hedda Gabler and Hester Prynne (hence ‘Xavier’). Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a ...”

“... a question: not could a woman write, but could a woman make a career for herself in literature? Virginia Woolf famously thought not, and illustrated her case by inventing Judith, a sister for Shakespeare, highly gifted like him but thwarted and denied because of her sex. The male genius writes plays and is admired; the female genius gets pregnant, goes ...”

“... contemporary with Private Lives. Auden and Isherwood made use of revue, music hall and jazz. Virginia Woolf explored bisexuality in her life and work. Woolf did develop a fragile and unlikely friendship with Coward, but she was wrong in her suggestion that, ‘in search of culture’, he thought of Bloomsbury as ...”

“... looking either, it turns out, because he seems to have left the set. An old dream of cinema, from Virginia Woolf to Stanley Cavell. Life gesticulates or vegetates; the camera keeps ...”

“... what they all do. Barbara Anderson’s last fiction led critics to mention Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, and call her a ‘born writer’, whatever that may mean. This one makes such praise hard to understand. It is a competent family saga of a familiar kind. Jack is the standard-model wild novelist, Sarah is determined to ‘keep her painting ...”