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“... person,’ and that is just what it is when it works most smoothly in Flaubert and elsewhere, in Woolf for example: the ‘she’ and the ‘I’ are different but on the same track. But there are also many moments like the one I have described, where the synthesis fails and we flounder between interpretations. These moments confirm one of Jameson’s most ...”

“... her marriage, or for many years after it, has survived. She would have been far from pleased with Michael Millgate’s speculations on their disappearance. ‘In her later years she was often regarded as a faintly ludicrous figure, and in her earlier years her status as Miss Emma Gifford or even as Mrs Thomas Hardy might well have been insufficient to ensure ...”

“... hand, is disastrous. One learns that Proust is the author of ‘a massive work’; that Virginia Woolf had ‘the typical agoraphobia of the anorexic’; and that ‘patriarchy’s language’ has prevented the avant-garde from ‘the real liberation of desire’. Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva please take note. The closing section, on art in Nazi Germany, on De ...”

“... for further reading – that we should first read A la recherche again, then James, Musil, Joyce, Woolf, Borges, Beckett, Nabokov and Calvino, then the rest of Proust, and only after that the biographers and the critics – is appealing in all kinds of ways, but perhaps underestimates the value and pleasures of the genre Bowie is himself pursuing so ...”

“... the policy to be. The paper’s practice is purely eclectic and largely literary. Eliot publishes Woolf, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Proust, Dostoevsky, Cavafy, Yeats, Lawrence, Valéry, Forster, Richards, Joyce and many others. This is not The Communist Manifesto, but it includes the liberal left and almost all of the literary avant-garde. ‘I do not know what ...”

“... A bolt-eyed, blue-shirted, shock headed hatless man ... ‘Mrs Woolf? ... I’m Graves.’ He appeared to have been rushing through the air at sixty miles an hour and to have alighted temporarily ... The poor boy is all emphasis, protestation and pose. He has a crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ...”

“... The writing is genuinely alive with what Connolly called ‘erotic nostalgia’. Both Powell and Michael Shelden emphasise his capacity for self-inspection, elevated to a comic art, on the subject of his own tastes and weaknesses (‘MESSAGE FROM THE ID: “If you would collect women instead of books I think I could help you” ’), and the acceptance of a ...”

“... in Autumn Journal, the one long poem MacNeice wrote that has survived its occasion. Virginia Woolf thought it feeble, and MacNeice was apologetic about its topical, personal, rambling journal-form: but now it seems not only the fullest expression of the poet’s sensibility, but also the truest expression of its moment in history – the indispensable ...”

“... in this, and indeed any biography – its author. As Gordon Craig transformed theatre design, so Michael Holroyd in 1967 revolutionised the writing of biography with Lytton Strachey, which extended the biographer’s reach from the public to the private, from the work to the man, from the study to the bedroom. In doing so, he breached the border between the ...”

“... in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do ...”

“... Even then he thought he was not a writer ‘in the single-minded and consuming sense’ in which Woolf and Hemingway were writers. ‘I have never known / What to do with this that I am heir to,’ Davie wrote in a poem. ‘This’ is Chapel as opposed to Church, English Dissent from the English Establishment. In another poem, Davie evokes ‘the ...”

“... and associates. From Ray Monk’s Life of Bertrand Russell, or Hermione Lee’s of Virginia Woolf, or Miranda Seymour’s of Ottoline Morrell, there comes an abundance and, in its repetitiveness, an overabundance of testimony about Vivienne’s or Tom’s nervous as well as physical collapses, about financial desperation, overwork, housing ...”

“... totalling eleven hundred pages, a fact which would have undoubtedly pleased their subject. Both Michael Newman’s ‘Political Biography’ and Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman’s ‘A Life on the Left’ rightly insist on their man’s public face. But even his political life was peculiar, if only because this profoundly political man never became a ...”

“... which suggest that the main narrator is wilfully composing his life as fiction. The fiction of Michael’s life is a story of guilt, penance and desire for absolution following the accidental childhood death of his sister, Fleur. The ‘unsolicited gift’ of the title would seem to have something to do with the gifts which have to compensate for what ...”

“... appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”