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“... symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius just seems to make it happen that way. But in fact he tried very hard indeed. No novelist is more ...”

“... intended by such a description: think, rather, of the impetuous, supercharged narrative manner of Virginia Woolf, or the cumulative music of Henry James. Where syntax and the overall shaping of a sentence are concerned, Clampitt can match both these supreme artists in the way she reflects the state of an enquiring or apprehending mind by means of the ...”

“... but description will surely remain the foundation of the most intelligent feminist writing. From Virginia Woolf to Andrea Dworkin, the power has always come from the detail. Naomi Wolf is far more readable and interesting on her anxiety at first receiving a substantial pay cheque or on what her pregnant belly told her about the abortion issue than she ...”

“... North excludes all non-academic criticism, so despite his title we hear nothing of such critics as Virginia Woolf and Cyril Connolly in Britain or Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley in the US. ‘There is much to be said … about the history of the idea of “criticism” before its entry into the university,’ he concedes in a footnote. ‘Naturally I ...”

“... and a business as a Famous Donor Sperm collector, to galactic war and resurrection by an avatar of Virginia Woolf. Sometimes, one has to say, Science Fiction just seems too crowded. Too many people have had too many ideas, and now they come too cheap. Just the same, two things in which the genre has become pre-eminent have been the creation of archetypes ...”

“... The scale of what the abolitionists were up against is only now becoming clear. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, opposition to anti-slavery may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the ...”

“... of the future. Philosophers debated the nature and duration of what we experience as ‘now’; Virginia Woolf explored in her novels heightened moments of the extended present; and the cinema ‘thickened’ the present into slow time, by prising open and expanding particular moments and events. The present ceased to be ephemeral and ...”

“... It has become fairly orthodox to observe – as everyone observes when talking about Schumann or Virginia Woolf or Van Gogh – that Nijinsky’s madness was not unattached to his genius. His choreography is a study in grace and brutality, in his ‘madness’ he invented modern dance, his mind is a set-text in the Jungian analysis of personality, he ...”

“... the other that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally.’ When Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that Russell was ‘brilliant of course; perfectly outspoken; familiar . . . His adventures with his wives diminish his importance,’ she was also saying something about certain connections in her own mind that ...”

“... biblical message. In a variety of guises and moods, one can hear the KJB resonating in the work of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison. One of the most interesting and perceptive essayists is R.S. Sugirtharajah, even though his postcolonial scrutiny of the KJB takes surprisingly bitter sideswipes at a rather good recent history of 1611 by Adam ...”

“... be open in every biography worth a publisher’s advance. The subjects of Victorian biography, as Virginia Woolf put it, had been ‘like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions through the street’. Froude’s Carlyle blew open the citadel of privacy. It encouraged public speculation about what Jane ...”

“... my own bags, I slipped on my own mopping. I went to a fantasy dinner party with General Custer and Virginia Woolf, and I never came home again, or else when I came home they’d moved it.It must be dawn soon, if it weren’t winter. I get my gloves on – or perhaps somebody else’s, you get your fingers mixed up at my age – and I make my way to the ...”

“... than usual, so that the section can plausibly be revealed, later on, to have been written by the Virginia Woolf-loving Briony Tallis; yet he must also please those readers who want his usual effects – tight plotting, withheld revelations, dark secrets, turning points. Martin Amis is right to consider this long passage McEwan’s best piece of ...”

“... Why? Because the child’s still dead.’ There are of course traces of dimly remembered abuse in Virginia Woolf, ghostly visions in corridors, shadows that fall across the page. The woman speaker of Beckett’s Not I is haunted by some ugly, not quite spoken event. And something that’s never named happens to May Sinclair’s young Harriet Frean down ...”

“... where ‘the hard chairs, the skimpy wine, & the very nice sensible conversation’ left Virginia Woolf cold but where, as Geoffrey Grigson remembered, one might bump into Braque … or Jean Hélion from Paris, or Eliot gayer than his reputation, actually singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’. The exodus from Hitler’s Reich having begun, one ...”