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“... These marvellous pieces, hundreds and hundreds of them, are being steadily collected and edited by Andrew McNeillie. The opening of Woolf’s review of A.C. Benson’s memoirs, though not in fact a TLS piece, shows her in characteristic club-clearing mode: In order to appreciate Mr Benson’s memories fully one should have been educated at Eton and ...”

“... smartly upon the edge of apparently solid objects and say, “Are you hard?” ’ We recall Andrew’s explanation of Mr Ramsay’s philosophical work to Lily: it is on ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’, and he tells her to ‘think of a kitchen table then when you’re not there’. That familiar philosophical trope of the table, to ...”

“... series of Woolf texts relies on a team of Canadian and American scholars (with the exception of Andrew McNeillie), is aimed mostly at American students (Black annotates ‘coalscuttles’, ‘margarine’ and ‘ironmongers’, for example), and sometimes takes the marked-up American proofs as copy-texts, thereby publishing editions which Woolf’s ...”

“... effusions, light-fingered Italian sonnets (delightfully translated for the Oxford edition by Andrew McNeillie), Ovidian neo-Latin elegies, two of the best answer poems in English (‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), a masque and two of the best neo-Latin elegies ever written in England and probably even in Northern Europe. These pieces were ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”