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“... reissued this month by Soft Skull. This took as its jumping-off point the fact that Leonard Woolf once had a marmoset of that name, acquired from his friend Victor Rothschild in 1934. In the novel, Rothschild sees an ailing monkey chained up outside a junk shop, feels sorry for it, buys it and tries to pass it off as a gift for his pregnant ...”

“... If ever a woman wanted a champion,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington.’ Norma Clarke intends to vindicate both the author and her Memoirs (she pays tribute to A.C. Elias’s invaluable 1997 edition). Correcting the long-standing categorisation of Pilkington as a ‘scandalous memoirist’ (her story was advertised alongside Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure), Clarke persuasively describes the Memoirs as a remarkable hybrid: as innovatively mock heroic as the Dunciad; as winningly frank and ramblingly anecdotal as the autobiography of her patron, the comic actor and poet laureate Colley Cibber; as dizzying in its inversion of perspective as Gulliver’s Travels; and as sentimental as the novels of Samuel Richardson, a patron for whom Pilkington provided inside information on the workings of the female heart and the doings of London libertines, and from whom she learned to write to the moment, and to keep in mind new possibilities for a woman’s story ...”

“... but not the sort who leaves behind either little masterpieces or great works of art. And yet Virginia Woolf, writing in 1916, not only called him a rare spirit, ‘one of those whom we like, or it may be dislike, as we do the living, so strong is their individuality’, one whose success lay in being ‘a master of his life’, sticking to a point ...”

“... parings of vegetables. The parings of vegetables have never interested Miss Compton-Burnett.’ Virginia Woolf at her critical best in ‘Indiscretions’ (1924), on the topic of which sex is allowed to admire which writer, with Keats bridging the gap: ‘But there is a hitch; there is Fanny Brawne. She danced too much at Hampstead, Keats ...”

“... Bell disagreed with her brother Clive over this issue. In January 1913 she wrote to Leonard Woolf: The reason I think that artists paint life and not patterns is that certain qualities of life, what I call movement, mass, weight, have aesthetic value. But where I would quarrel with Clive is when he says one gets the same emotion from flat patterns that ...”

“... be said of Wharton. ‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ In her magnificent study of Virginia Woolf, Lee chose to answer Woolf’s question not so much by writing a sequential narrative from cradle to grave as by offering a series of topical essays, loosely arranged by chronology and artfully composed to ...”

“... couples from Bloomsbury are discussed. Though one cannot agree with Louise de Salvo that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s affair ‘became the most significant and longlasting in each of their lives’, Sackville-West certainly was for a time muse to Woolf. ...”

“... Epstein, Gropius, Keynes, Kokoschka, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Picasso, Stravinsky and Virginia Woolf; and with Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt, not to mention Sam Goldwyn and Charlie Chaplin. These are the men and women who made the modern world, and the Modernist expression of it: their identity as a generation is more ...”

“... On or about December 1910,’ Virginia Woolf noted, ‘human character changed.’ It was hard in or about March 1977 in Barcelona not to feel that human character had changed again, or had changed back, or might change more. Franco was less than 18 months dead, and many of the sights and images in the city were puzzling ...”

“... dressed with garlic and olive oil – and then finds herself too miserable to eat it. Steely Virginia Woolf used food ideologically in her books. The great boeuf en daube of To the Lighthouse embodies the texture of the life of a bourgeois family: cook has been two days making it; Mrs Ramsay presides over it; but it is tiresome Mr Ramsay, sulky and ...”

“... two assistants, but, all the same, Wright is perhaps rather too hard on them. In her biography of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee describes Lehmann as one of the ‘ambitious, thwarted, talented young men’ who ‘rubbed up against Leonard’s adamantine proprietariness and perfectionism ... It was a well-known joke among their friends that working at the ...”

“... else who has written about Wilson, especially the women, to distance herself from her subject. Virginia Woolf, whose essay on Wilson was published in The Moment and Other Essays, in 1947, was extraordinarily ambivalent. The author of A Room of One’s Own is contemptuous of Wilson’s ‘scribbling for cash’ and, drawn reluctantly to admiration for ...”

“... wishy-washiness that characterised all her dealings with the English (including her courtship of Virginia Woolf and her friendship with Graham Greene, who dedicated The Honorary Consul to her). But the Prince stayed in her Buenos Aires flat only for one evening, and he was still, no doubt, aching after a fall from his horse as he was progressing in ...”

“... the reader’s natural eagerness to sniff out and to detect a Compton-Burnett situation (or a Virginia Woolf one – see her skit ‘Freshwater’) begins to feel a decided bafflement. For Emily really does seem to have been the perfect mother as well as wife: friendly, accessible and confiding, treating her sons more as extra husbands, both to look ...”

“... continuously laments that it is too often not done at all. Hermione Lee proposes the example of Virginia Woolf, who hadn’t much time for either dons or literary journalists. She believed that ‘one should try to read books as if one were writing them,’ and advised an audience of Cambridge undergraduates thus: ‘Do not begin by being a ...”