Vanessa Curtis

3 weeks ago | the-tls.co.uk | Holly Fairgrieve |Claire Harman |Vanessa Curtis |Richard Price

To access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe hereVirginia Woolf’s museIn search of the real Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus SmithThe idea that Vita Sackville-West was the model for Orlando (1928) is well established, but who exactly inspired Woolf’s other great work of fictional biography, Mrs Dalloway (1925), remains uncertain.

3 weeks ago | the-tls.co.uk | Claire Harman |Holly Fairgrieve |Vanessa Curtis |Richard Price

To access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe hereOur secret friendJane Austen as a ‘life guide’Jane Austen’s novels are full of readers: Catherine Morland, Anne Elliot, Charlotte Heywood, Fitzwilliam Darcy, who, piqued at being disturbed by Miss Bingley, reminds her that the most important task of the woman who wishes to achieve true accomplishment is “the improvement of her mind by extensive reading”.

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Vanessa Curtis

A detail from a photograph of Virginia Woolf (including rear of David Cecil’s head) by Lady Ottoline Morrell, Garsington, June 1923. From the book under review© By permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Diana Darke |Vanessa Curtis |James Hall

Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylized designs that are often botanically impossible, yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art.

Dec 4, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones |Mary Beard |Vanessa Curtis |J. E. Smyth

Dear Pedro Almodóvar, I resisted your early films when they came out, put off by the naughty-boy transgressions and failing to recognize their vitality and underlying good humour. Then, in 1988, the first sequence of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made a convert of me, with the camera on a level with Carmen Maura’s feet as she paced in desperation back and forth across a polished floor like a cornered tigress in high heels.