Virginia Woolf

Hide and seek with T.S. Eliot

12 December 2015 9:00 am

Not only is this the definitive edition of T.S. Eliot’s poems, it is also the best biography of the poet we have, says Daniel Swift

Autumn: time for a pie

Autumn, season of conkers and new boots

26 September 2015 9:00 am

Each year when I see the first conker of the autumn I think: fire up the ancestral ovens! This incendiary…

A.N. Wilson’s diary: VJ Day and the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…

Rapture - and loathing: Woolf Works at the Royal Ballet reviewed

23 May 2015 9:00 am

People have been saying that Wayne McGregor’s new Woolf Works has reinvented the three-act ballet, but not so. William Forsythe…

Although Keynes hated his appearance, he was much painted by the Bloomsbury Group, including by Roger Fry (above)

John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf

28 March 2015 9:00 am

To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…

Vita as ‘Lady with a Red Hat’ by William Strang

Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…

Castle Cottage in Near Sawrey, Cumbria, where Beatrix Potter lived after her marriage to William Heelis

Behind (almost) every great writer is a great garden

8 November 2014 9:00 am

It is a truism that writers of all kinds often find inspiration and solace in their gardens, as well as…

Chatting up Katherine Mansfield

4 October 2014 9:00 am

I like the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who according to Virginia Woolf smelt like a civet cat and had…

The Bloomsbury painters bore me

6 September 2014 9:00 am

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) claimed that nothing has really happened until it has been recorded, so this new exhibition at the…

Sorbet with Rimbaud

23 August 2014 9:00 am

The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…

Josefa Duran, the flamenco dancer known as ‘Pepita’

Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Look at the Sackville-Wests

10 May 2014 9:00 am

When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls…

If you think Virginia Woolf’s novels are good, you should try her bread

12 April 2014 9:00 am

I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their…

‘Grace Higgens in the Kitchen’ by Vanessa Bell

The Angel of Charleston, by Stewart MacKay - review

18 January 2014 9:00 am

Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…