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At the Movies

Michael Wood: Yasujiro Ozu, 25 February 2010

Yasujiro Ozu Season 
BFI Southbank 2010, until 28 February 2010Show More
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... 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 ...

At New Hall

Eleanor Birne: Modern Women’s Art, 29 June 2017

... 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 ...

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... 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 ...

Each of us is a snowball

Susannah Clapp: Squares are best, 22 October 2020

Square Haunting 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 422 pp., £20, January, 978 0 571 33065 2
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... 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 ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
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The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
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... 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 ...

Round Things

T.J. Binyon, 24 October 1991

Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe 
by Emma Letley.
Constable, 269 pp., £18.95, September 1991, 0 09 469870 8
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... 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 ...

Escaping the curssed orange

Norma Clarke: Jane Barker, 5 April 2001

Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725 
by Kathryn King.
Oxford, 263 pp., £40, September 2000, 0 19 818702 5
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... 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 ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... 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 ...

Timo of Corinth

Julian Symons, 6 August 1992

A Choice of Murder 
by Peter Vansittart.
Peter Owen, 216 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 0 7206 0832 5
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Portrait of the Artist’s Wife 
by Barbara Anderson.
Secker, 309 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 9780436200977
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Turtle Moon 
by Alice Hoffman.
Macmillan, 255 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 0 333 57867 8
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Double Down 
by Tom Kakonis.
Macmillan, 308 pp., £14.99, April 1992, 0 333 57492 3
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... 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 ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Agnès Varda, 5 November 2009

... 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 ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Barbie’, 10 August 2023

... what it means to be a woman in a world governed by the imagination of men. A sort of riff on the Virginia Woolf of Three Guineas.But then the journey itself abandons all seriousness and psychology and becomes pure cartoon. How else would we imagine an excursion out of Barbieland? Robbie and Gosling start out in her car, and as the vehicle crosses the ...

At the Serpentine

Jo Applin: On Barbara Kruger, 21 March 2024

... to Star Wars). A quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four is pasted on the floor. One wall has lines by Virginia Woolf. On the back wall, the text morphs as though seen through a magnifying glass; a giant ‘YOU’ is placed at the centre – the perfect spot for a selfie. It could all be a bit naff, or overbearing, but Kruger knows this. She’s neither bully ...

I behave like a fiend

Deborah Friedell: Katherine Mansfield’s Lies, 4 January 2024

All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything 
by Claire Harman.
Vintage, 295 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 5299 1834 2
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... Virginia Woolf​ wasn’t sure what she felt when she heard that Katherine Mansfield was dead. The cook, ‘in her sensational way’, had broken the news to her at breakfast: ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day ...

Very like Poole Harbour

Patricia Beer, 5 December 1991

With and Without Buttons 
by Mary Butts, edited by Nathalie Blondel.
Carcanet, 216 pp., £13.95, October 1991, 0 85635 944 0
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... segregated in self-conscious little groups. In London on more than one occasion in the Thirties, Virginia Woolf reported conversations with Tony Butts, friend of William Plomer and brother of Mary, about his sister. She is a bad woman – pretentious – I can see no merit in her books – pretentious. She corrupts young men. They are always committing ...

Beware of shallowness

James Wood, 7 July 1994

Art & Lies 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 224 pp., £14.99, June 1994, 0 224 03145 7
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... things, but words that are living things with the power to move.’ One of Winterson’s models is Virginia Woolf, and Art & Lies is also a Woolfian engine of self-advertisement whereby the text is both the novel and the explanation for the novel. It is militant with excuses; like a pianola, it plays itself again and again. Each of the book’s three ...

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