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“... as almost comically mild, so that Lytton Strachey labelled him ‘the taupe’ and Virginia Woolf wished he would be more open so that one could require him to ‘stand and deliver’; or when we read in P.N. Furbank’s biography of strange outbreaks of solitary violence, when he hurled himself against the furniture. Percy Lubbock, who knew him ...”

“... he had heard from Gertrude Tennant. It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust. ‘Yielding to family pressure,’ as James put it, ‘he offered his hand to ...”

“... most good novelists they are preoccupied as much with power as with class. Furbank mentions some lord who said it was ‘middle-class not to decant champagne’. Attitudes to this pronouncement might be taken as a good instance of the difference between ‘unholy pleasure’ and true snobbery. As in the case of the fishknives, most people would be moderately ...”

“... or the Bond Street, or the Ritzy Style, unless those places have all been taken over by Lord Forte within the last couple of weeks, or, of all her styles that one which I feel she held most close to her heart, and which, again disrespectfully, I call the Bowen 707 or the Take-Off Style, which lifts her into the skies of her poet’s imagination. For ...”

“... chancellorship and later earned himself a place in a Nazi handbook on Britain (‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity’). All the same, Hannay and Buchan’s other characters continue to obsess uneasily about Jewishness. The books’ minor villains and disreputable bit-players are sometimes Jewish, but the subject often comes up in a way that’s ...”

“... Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question that ...”

“... saw a decisive break with the values of the Victorian era, the assumption expressed in Virginia Woolf’s celebrated hyperbole that ‘in or about December 1910, human character changed’. Those intellectuals whom we still find it convenient to refer to as ‘Bloomsbury’ may have paraded their revolt against Victorian parents and grandparents, and ...”

“... West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is not absurd. It emerges that what is required for popularity is a certain reputation, occasional brushes with high life and lengthy diaries and letters filled with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the advantage that he ...”

“... to warn audiences that “we are not going to enjoy ourselves”’ (a quotation from Virginia Woolf). Entering Edy’s head, Holroyd finds that it was difficult for her ‘not to blame the National Trust’ for the Second World War. She and Christopher St John were ‘trouts’ and the latter had a ‘huge posterior’. Nonetheless, as Holroyd ...”

“... feel that something human, or once human, is stalking them. Relationships in the group fall apart; Lord of the Flies is referenced and hopes of a rescue fade. But the last voice in the book, Nina’s comes from a place of safety:I’d always wondered how Virginia Woolf could be so flippant about the 1918 Spanish flu in her ...”

“... and she turns immediately to the Bible which ‘fell open near the beginning. She read: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain.” ’ The scar on Stephen’s face (the result of a wartime wound), which becomes livid at times of stress, functions as that mark. Despite Hall’s attempts to court the sympathy of heterosexuals by writing about a textbook case of ...”

“... up.The daisy chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, nicknamed ‘La Brioche’ for the way she curled her hair, and started an affair. Barney became jealous, dubbed van Zuylen a fat Valkyrie, and ...”

“... men in a prison chapel to recall a favourite text of her father’s: ‘And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision.’ No open vision, but blind understanding. At the close, his wife and her sister interpret Bainbridge’s surprising but unimportunate desire to visit Hungary and its ‘unpronounceable names’ as his ...”

“... sooner arrived than it had come under the control and guidance of a new set of tribal chiefs, with Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but ...”

“... opinions of her own talent. She was a muse to perhaps the greatest novelist of the age, Virginia Woolf, who was now setting out to immortalise her in the pages of Orlando. And then this. A book about trudging through Persia, as Iran was then known, with Harold Nicolson, her diplomat and writer husband. ‘For a long time,’ the first line of Twelve Days in ...”