Search Results

“... the scheme of things. Twenty-five years ago, Strachey’s books were not in paperback and Virginia Woolf was not the feminist idol she has since become. The reputation of E.M. Forster was in decline. The paintings of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were not privately collected and had been demoted to the cellars of many public galleries. The art criticism of ...”

“... and said: “No fair, I wanted to steal the TV set.”’ The striking thing about this – as Michael Malone points out in his ultra-detailed history of Apple, Infinite Loop – is that there isn’t a shred of truth in the idea that Gates had the GUI first. It was pure gorilla-think. ‘In his peculiar and dangerous manner, Gates didn’t look upon the ...”

“... but there is nowadays no reason to endorse this kind of prejudice. Some twenty years ago, Greg Woolf forced scholars to rethink entirely the phenomenon we still, for want of a better term, call Romanisation. Now, he wants to do the same thing for ancient urbanism in The Life and Death of Ancient Cities, a general history that manages to escape both the ...”

“... a hard May. My varsity jacket. The sky between leaves is the brightest thing in nature, Virginia Woolf told the inquiring Rupert Brooke. Whatever. Laisser-faire I can really only feign disapproval of my youngest dibbling his semolina’d fingers in the satiny lining of her red coat. Is it decided Planetary weather, A glittering canopy of gas, otherwise not a ...”

“... It is fatal for a woman,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘in any way to speak consciously as a woman.’ Fatal for her as a writer, Woolf meant, but even so, not many people will now agree with this view. Not all that many, perhaps, will understand it straight off. How could it be fatal? How could you not write or speak as a woman if you were one? Except by pretending to speak or write as a man ...”

“... of George Meredith’s correspondence in 1912, he felt ‘so nauseated’, he told Virginia Woolf, that he shut the book at once: Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will ...”

“... of patterns, lace, brocades, velvets, taffetas. Shopping lists were pinned to her bosom. Virginia Woolf read the American edition of Challenge in the mid-1920s when she began writing Orlando, described by Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’. Orlando is a love letter to his mother, the ...”

“... exiles and dreams that form this book is to extend those frontiers. Some fifty years ago Virginia Woolf likened the biographer to the miner’s canary ‘testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. Compared to fiction and poetry, biography had only recently begun its career, but such experiments as Lytton ...”

“... would be a Fabian Paradise.’ Sidney’s part seems to have been similar to that of Leonard Woolf in the support each husband gave to an exceptional wife. It is our loss that Jeanne MacKenzie has not entered this Fabian Paradise and presented the choice between Mrs Webb and Mrs Woolf that, according to Noel ...”

“... the books I was carrying (a collection of Edwin Muir’s essays, of which he approved; Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, at which he wrinkled his nose) and asked me to come for a drink at six that evening, before moving off towards Clare Old Court with a curiously sideways walk that made him look as though he were being gently pulled away from his intended ...”

“... Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy ...”

“... permutations would have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t so well.’ Increasingly anguished by the implications of ...”

“... If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it follows that the enemy of Michael Howard is my hero. So awful was Howard’s long reign at the Home Office that many liberals sought democratic relief from the most blatantly undemocratic section of the establishment: the judiciary. It was the strange sound of Law Lords denouncing Howard’s preposterous insistence that ‘prison works’ and the widespread jubilation at his many snubbings in the courts that led to liberal hosannas for the judges ...”

“... founder of women’s writing, the figure who had been hymned but effectively dismissed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,’ Woolf wrote, only to declare Behn’s actual ...”

“... When The Well of Loneliness came out in July 1928 the reviewers were not astonished. Both Leonard Woolf and L.P. Hartley thought the book sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained’. It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye ...”