“ A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shi… Hermione Lee
“ She had an absurd meeting, arranged by Violet Trefusis and Raymond Mortimer, with Violet’s mother Mrs Keppel, the ex-mistress of Edward VII. Both had anticipated having nothing to say to each other, b… Hermione Lee
“ Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when ‘the writer tells his own story’, since only he knows the whole truth about himself. (He does not use the word ‘autobiography’, which only ca… Hermione Lee
“ The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and ea… Hermione Lee
“ In a political discussion about the empire, Harold the diplomat argued for the benefits of colonial rule: ‘our English genius is for government.’ Raymond opposed him: ‘The governed don’t seem to enjoy… Hermione Lee
“ Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures - for they are rather… Hermione Lee
“ Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential self, the extent to which a life can be lived accord… Hermione Lee
“ We can allow ourselves this 1920s picture of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, dancing the Chicken Strut or the Memphis Shake together, with Leonard, pehaps, winding up the gramophone, after tea on a Jun… Hermione Lee
“ From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) give… Hermione Lee
“ In Downhill All the Way, Leonard remembers them returning from an evening spent with Vanessa in her studio in Fitzroy Street. (This was in 1930.)A drunk woman was being abused by two passers-by and wa… Hermione Lee
