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“... is highly effective, but it can never produce what Henry James would have called ‘saturation’. Virginia Woolf remarked that A Handful of Dust was a brilliant novel but that she didn’t believe a word of it: a way of turning round the ordinary reader’s cliché to suggest that truth in fiction has a complex and even evasive personality which can’t ...”

“... watching, instead of by the all too visible labours of a Balzac or a Dickens. It is strange that Virginia Woolf should have accused Galsworthy of too much solidity: he seems, on the contrary, the least solid of writers – a writer of almost gossamer lightness. He can do you clothes and interior decoration, but his reach as social historian does not ...”

“... whom a bad review qualified as undiluted praise. The writers were Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf. The reviewers were J.C. Squire, Gerald Gould, Desmond McCarthy: critics of such iron-plated opaque insensibility to modern literature that praise from them could only harm, attack only promote. In the early Thirties there arose a new ...”

“... Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘The Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will to a strict Anglicanism – an awkward fit. The poetry’s tension arises ‘when her thwarted experience of eros ...”

“... with the unbeliever Hardy at one side, and the Jesuit Hopkins at the other, let us lay upon it, as Virginia Woolf proposed at the centenary of George Eliot’s birth, ‘whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and ...”

“... working a few days a week at Fry’s Omega Workshops: one of the young women – ‘cropheads’, Virginia Woolf called them, on account of their distinctive bobs – who painted decorative designs onto furniture, fabric, lampshades and other objects. ‘Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant worked sometimes at the Omega Workshops,’ Hamnett writes in Laughing ...”

“... for such a part. You don’t need to have played George in the first run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway to know how to make a minimal gesture at the right moment. No Auditor is visible in the filmed version of Whitelaw’s interpretation of the role – only the use of split screen could remedy that – but she refers to its ...”

“... Desnos, eager to unite the two sexes in his own sensibility – just like our all-time heroine Virginia Woolf. But, but, but: when I remember how my fascination with Surrealism started I have to confess that it was with Breton’s face. I fell in love with his face. Then with his writing, that style (perhaps a bit pompous) that I longed to (and did ...”

“... me on, over a proof, making reference, if I remember correctly, to Ezra Pound, Duke Ellington, Virginia Woolf, Picasso and Coco Chanel. A good editor’s interests can be as mysterious as a good writer’s style, and Silvers was always trying to work out if something was worth getting into. Colm Tóibín remembers going to a show by Anthony Gormley in ...”

“... this time. In 1945, Chatto (founded in 1855) had absorbed the Hogarth Press (begun by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917). In 1969, Chatto and Cape (founded 1921) merged, aiming, as they hoped, to maintain separate identities within their coalition. The union was enlarged by Bodley Head in 1973. In 1975, CBC formed an alliance with the paperback ...”

“... Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1986): ‘I now propose the bottle as hero.’ Le Guin mentions that Virginia Woolf, in her notes for Three Guineas, defined the word ‘heroism’ as ‘botulism’. The eccentric design of Ives’s novel begins to make sense.Le Guin takes her cue from Woman’s Creation (1975), a book by the anthropologist Elizabeth ...”

“... lean over one artist’s shoulder as he or she leans over another’s. And so, as she pores over Virginia Woolf’s posthumous reinterpretation of her friend Roger Fry and Evelyn Waugh’s thoughts about Rossetti, she notes Eliot’s essay on Kipling, published just after ‘East Coker’. The author of Puck of Pook’s Hill was ‘another literary ...”

“... itself sincere, and made a strong, half-uncomfortable appeal to readers as different as Hardy and Virginia Woolf. One of these early admirers was the novelist May Sinclair. Charlotte had written to her in 1913 congratulating her on The Combined Maze, a novel in which the image for the human condition is a men and women’s evening gym class at the ...”

“... study of Byron’s daughter Allegra, both issued in 1935. The latter was published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which led to her meeting with Virginia Woolf, whose diaries describe her as ‘tremulous’, ‘honest-eyed’ and very glamorous: ‘I like her bird of paradise flight through the gay world. A ...”

“... traveller, always on the move. There’s nothing about Mansfield that’s institutional. She knew Woolf and Lawrence and the rest, published in the same avant-garde magazines, went to the same parties and talked about the same things, but the fact that her biography doesn’t sit comfortably alongside theirs, seems more insubstantial than theirs, is due as ...”