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“... come to dread the direct untreated response by their students, pronouncing E.M. Forster soppy, or Virginia Woolf a bit of a bitch. High-tech negates such responses, rescuing itself from social and worldly critical converse – the medium in which the novel naturally swims. To discuss in the old fashion the characters of War and Peace or Anna Karenina is ...”

“... There are also diagrams which do not enter into the pagination. A lot is being asked of those whom Virginia Woolf addressed collectively as ‘the common reader’, but there will be a reward for their persistence. The third part of the book, which explores the bearing of Honderich’s theory of determinism on our claims to knowledge, our moral ...”

“... been better off with an office job? Would Proust? I mean no disrespect to Roy Fuller in asking if Virginia Woolf is not a better novelist than him, or Rilke a better poet. But I feel the issue needs to be raised, because it is one that goes to the heart of this whole collection. Salutary and welcome though it is, it is perhaps in danger of assimilating ...”

“... Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is not absurd. It emerges that what is required for popularity is a certain reputation, occasional brushes with high life and lengthy diaries and letters filled with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the ...”

“... a centre, a meeting-place for the diverse activities of people whom no tradition controls,’ as Virginia Woolf once said of sport in the work of Ring Lardner. Although, according to its foreword, Outerbridge Reach, Stone’s new novel, is ‘a fiction referring to the present day’, Vietnam still leaks a constant drizzle into the life of Owen ...”

“... the married filmmakers Marie Mencken and Willard Maas (models for the couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Others – the garrulous, waspish speed freak who called himself Pope Ondine, for example, or Barbara Rubin, the teenage networker who introduced Warhol to Dylan and Dylan to Allen Ginsberg, while making the infamously explicit movie ...”

“... Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most ...”

“... time, may be remembered only by historians. The book was a success and even won the praise of Virginia Woolf, who normally did not allow her intimate connection with his family to sweeten her comments on his work. But some diplomatic superiors thought the book cheeky. Of course Some People was published many years before Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait ...”

“... failed to warn audiences that “we are not going to enjoy ourselves”’ (a quotation from Virginia Woolf). Entering Edy’s head, Holroyd finds that it was difficult for her ‘not to blame the National Trust’ for the Second World War. She and Christopher St John were ‘trouts’ and the latter had a ‘huge posterior’. Nonetheless, as ...”

“... But the last voice in the book, Nina’s comes from a place of safety:I’d always wondered how Virginia Woolf could be so flippant about the 1918 Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke between Lytton Strachey’s sore finger and Lady Murray’s invitation to lunch, when the death rate in parts of London was higher than it had been in the ...”

“... he overlooks the fact that welfare reforms were also supported by figures like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes and other disciples of G.E. Moore, all of whom he identifies as the advance guard of the Edwardian reaction against ‘altruism’. (In fact, most of the Bloomsbury set saw no incompatibility at all between ...”

“... in Anglo-Latin are more likely to have an author’s name attached.Almost a hundred years ago Virginia Woolf proposed, in A Room of One’s Own, that ‘Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’ Generations of feminist scholars have filled in the history of women’s writing in the late medieval period. Much of it ...”

“... the fact or the thing or the deed’. Despite her reactionary stance, Cather here sounds close to Virginia Woolf and her experimental writing. Cather and Lewis had to move from their apartment to make way for a subway. The griefs of age came on. Her father died and her mother had a stroke in California, where Cather travelled to see her, feeling the old ...”

“... and fears but ‘something else’: ‘The sum of his days’. At the opening of The Hours (1999), Virginia Woolf lies drowned at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story ...”

“... at the Savoy, but somewhere in between. The Mitfords weren’t feminists, and they weren’t Virginia Woolf, but it seems possible that Woolf would have had a nicer time altogether had she known how to have a friend like Nancy or Jessica Mitford. The world might have seemed less pressing, and more adaptable to her ...”