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“... In 1927, Antonio Gramsci was in chains, about to begin a nightmarish 19-day journey from Sicily to Milan’s San Vittore prison, when he met two ‘common criminals’ in a Palermo waiting-room. One of them refused to accept that he was indeed Gramsci ‘because Antonio Gramsci must be a giant and not such a tiny man.’ Disappointed, the man, Gramsci reported, ‘said nothing more, withdrew to a corner, sat down on an unmentionable contraption and stayed there, like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, meditating on his lost illusions ...”

“... plates (out of 140 pieces) with a series of portraits of great women, including Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf themselves. ‘It ought to please the feminists,’ Bell observed. In a way, this incident was a model example of how the challenge posed by Bloomsbury could be re-absorbed into the trivial project of Civilisation, the creation of a lifestyle for a ...”

“... knew of one another – in l911, there was a partial, temporary and gingerly link-up, initiated by Virginia Woolf; and all along James Strachey, born to be Bloomsbury but in love with Rupert Brooke, functioned as a sort of inter-coterie courier. So it’s easy to get confused, and although, like most generalisations, Delany’s compare-and-contrast exercise is ...”

“... life,’ one reviewer wrote, ‘slips by like a panorama of earth’s loveliest experience.’ Virginia Woolf reviewed the book for the TLS, trying to remedy the relentless superficiality of the stitched-together letters and reminiscences by hinting that far from being Marsh’s sunny figure, Brooke was ‘the most restless, complex and analytic of human ...”

“... he now says, ‘quite abstract, mainly, I believe, because I omitted the essential character of Virginia from it’. Last year, he went back to his old novel and prepared it for its present publication, mainly by cutting it down: despite the omissions, there is not quite so much mystery as usual about the motivation of the principal characters, ...”

“... The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The president had been thinking about what would happen after the war since 1862, when ...”

“... In​ 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing ...”

“... he was sweeping the board. He was up in Ohio! He was up in Pennsylvania! He wasn’t just up in Virginia, he was up by a double-digit amount! (At this point, anyone with detailed knowledge of American politics might have been given pause for thought.) Let’s skip the next eight years and send a dynamiting crew to Mount Rushmore right now! Don’t forget to ...”

“... of ‘Speak 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 ...”

“... brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. ‘In these pages,’ the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor’s note, ‘you will meet persons who could be characterised, and could recognise themselves, as one – or some – of the following: a girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as a ...”

“... plus. The diversity rationale was initially posited by the Harvard law school professor Archibald Cox. It was picked up in 1978 by the conservative Justice Lewis F. Powell in the Supreme Court’s first plenary encounter with affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell, in a pivotal decision, embraced the diversity rationale ...”

“... novels such as Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown in the 1980s. (The culture secretary Virginia Bottomley praised the role of the classic serial in promoting ‘our country, our cultural heritage and our tourist trade’.) For Wearing, contemporary drama (the ‘journalism of the imagination’) was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant ...”

“... and the heart, causing massive internal bleeding. He had no chance of survival. Captain Andrew Cox dispatched a helicopter to pick up the injured man and bring him back to base. The helicopter carried him to camp Abu Naji where he was ventilated, but his pupils became fixed and at 00.50 hrs on 2 May 2005, surrounded by medical officers, Guardsman Wakefield ...”