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“... A hundred years later Barrett Browning had become a damsel famed in story. In 1934 Virginia Woolf observed that ‘“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one September ...”

“... added: ‘I know of course that you would not agree to this.’ He was right, but so was Virginia Woolf. ‘A sturdy figure,’ she wrote in 1918, ‘& a fat decided clever face.’ The Dulwich exhibition, curated by Boyd Haycock, is varied and incoherent, a little like a posthumous degree show. It’s almost awkwardly clear from the first room that Spencer ...”

“... All the same, there is something gallant about the way the old trouper soldiered on, becoming Lord Rector of Glasgow University and Sir Compton, lending himself to the cause of Scottish Nationalism and walking about in a kilt on Barra, where he wrote Whisky Galore and many another ‘richly comic’ novel. He was always surrounded by adoring women who ...”

“... that never quite coheres. As Harris explains, she has taken much of her inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a hard act to follow and not always a helpful influence. Harris describes her own approach in the introduction as having ‘tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it’. It’s an image that will ...”

“... not, so to speak, up to the technology, a point noted with characteristic sharpness by Virginia Woolf in a letter to Hughes. ‘It’s full of remarkable things. What I’m not sure is whether they coalesce ... on the one hand there’s the storm: on the other the people. And between them there’s a gap, in which there’s some want of strength.’ There ...”

“... that evening: not the lecture he was due to give to an audience of fifty at the Kensington home of Lord and Lady Glenconner on the poetry of Arnaut Daniel, but the one Marinetti was due to give to an audience of five hundred at the Bechstein Hall on Futurism. ‘“Futurist” Leader in London,’ reported the Daily Chronicle, ‘Makes an Attack on the English ...”

“... had the means to lead a very agreeable life, his hard reading interrupted at will by cricket at Lord’s, boating and climbing. When he married, his father increased his allowance, and did so again as each child was born, for he assumed that his son could not do his proper work in the world if he had to earn his own living. He gave Frederic the best ...”

“... The Book of Numbers contains the little prayer so beloved of the Christian liturgy: ‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.’ He casts his now kindly face upon ours. The Hebrew ...”

“... letters and the world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a ...”

“... What else is known against this great under-achiever? Anne Edwards tells us that he was a crony of Lord Arthur Somerset, who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an ...”

“... or, as Frederic Harrison put it, ‘a story of rank cruelty and almost insanity’. Virginia Woolf agreed, speaking of the ‘almost insane religious mania of the father’. This, without question, was a book about the grim oppression of a life-denying father and the admirable resilience of a persecuted son. Father and Son was the only book to survive ...”

“... known to most people only through this gloss. Born in 1874, the eighth child of Ned Baring, first Lord Revelstoke and head of the Baring Brothers bank, Maurice had an idyllic childhood, spent mainly at Membland, the family home in Dorset – a house with a larder big enough for 2000 head of game. After an equally idyllic time at Eton and some time abroad ...”

“... to her.’ And for whatever reason, as she finds her way, it isn’t to drift Mansfield and Woolf style, avoiding closure or narrative certainty. Bowen’s stories don’t break the genre frame; rather, they swell it from the inside and make it strange. That’s her modernism. At this stage all her stories were still set in England, or in an England ...”

“... for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of Claridge’s. The transitions ...”

“... of a standard. This was not entirely their fault. They gave themselves airs, certainly. Virginia Woolf considered her musings about the war to be a ‘whiff of shot in the cause of freedom’. Elizabeth Bowen was even more grandiloquent: ‘Wartime writing is in a sense resistance writing.’ But in fact their subject and the attitude they were required to ...”