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“... with Private Lives. Auden and Isherwood made use of revue, music hall and jazz. Virginia Woolf explored bisexuality in her life and work. Woolf did develop a fragile and unlikely friendship with Coward, but she was wrong in her suggestion that, ‘in search of culture’, he thought of Bloomsbury as ‘a kind of ...”

“... of her essays on biography, “Lives of the Obscure”,’ Cohen notes in the preface, Virginia Woolf writes that ‘one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost … waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom.’ This romance has its appeal. I have wanted to ...”

“... goes another more personal one about Hartley’s great, perhaps greatest, friend, Lord David Cecil. In keeping with his views on what fiction ought to be, Wright insists that this warm, heartfelt but altogether jokey relationship was the tragedy of Hartley’s own life, leaving him with a legacy of disconsolements, and a desolating sense of what rewards ...”

“... there is a general air of cold fish about all Macaulay’s work, as Virginia Woolf noted of the successful 1920 novel, Potterism: ‘Rose, judging from her works, is a Eunuch – that’s what I dislike most about Potterism. She has no parts. And surely she must be the daughter of a don?’ The ‘lack of parts’ is Macaulay’s ...”

“... of talking prompted E.M. Forster to say that her ‘every word … should be recorded.’ Virginia Woolf wrote of ‘her genius of personality’ and borrowed some of her characteristics (her rapidity of gesture and quick changes of mood) for Lucrezia, Septimus’s wife in Mrs Dalloway. After Keynes’s death in 1946, Lydia gradually withdrew from the world ...”

“... presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, and curiously finished off with a high green silk headdress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she has ...”

“... Jane Heap of the Little Review to Todd’s Madge Garland, her fashion editor at Vogue). Woolf called her Champco, and borrowed her clothes: ‘How odd, it comes into my mind, is Nessa & my jealousy of each other’s clothes! I feel her, when I put on my smart black fringed cape, anguished for a second: did I get it from Champco?’ Todd continued ...”

“... Max Garnett/Clive Durham.’ Given these criteria of resemblance, the names of Augustus Hervey and Cecil Vyse are not ‘quite dissimilar’, so Morgan may have seen his tutor Mr Hervey, who, like Cecil Vyse, wore ‘eyeglasses and a moustache’, trying to kiss his mother. Names also have an etymological ...”

“... by Edwin Landseer. The tradition later influenced society photographers – Madame Yevonde, Cecil Beaton – who encouraged fantasy play-acting in their subjects. Christmas cards sent from posts in the empire assemble the British colony in fancy dress – sometimes cross-dressed and sometimes dressed up as the locals. All over the pink map in the 19th ...”

“... group identity. In the 1930s, that identity seemed to be incarnated in its purest form in Cecil Day-Lewis (as an author, he used only his initial, and for a while he experimented, driven by self-consciousness about class, with omitting the hyphen). Of the four, it was Day-Lewis who came closest to fulfilling the ancient bardic role of recording in ...”

“... she sent a fan letter to H.D. asking if she could visit her in Cornwall, where she was living with Cecil Gray, a musicologist, while her husband, Richard Aldington, was serving on the Western Front. H.D. thought the writer was an elderly schoolmistress: she got a surprise when the 24-year-old millionaire’s daughter turned up. Souhami compares their meeting ...”

“... 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 long ...”

“... as welcome to the respectable artisan (much cultivated by feminists) as to anyone else. Virginia Woolf records the shock that ran through a Women’s Co-operative Guild branch meeting when Mrs Bessie Ward ventured to discuss venereal disease in 1917. If only because of their need for a following, British suffragist leaders were far more conciliatory to men ...”

“... found much to say about de la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ...”

“... were added, later its most memorable feature, a grand triumphal Trojan staircase of Mussolini or Cecil B. De Mille proportions, from the top of which you could see France on a clear day. Inside, there was a Moorish courtyard, marble everywhere and extravagant murals by José María Sert, ‘the Tiepolo of the Ritz’. Philip was fully aware of the high camp ...”