Sublime

a ‘slow hunch’ – the anti-‘lightbulb moment,’ the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

She occupies her days with clothing – in the mending and embellishment of it for purposes theatrical and ecclesiastical, in ironing and starching it; even sometimes in constructing new garments out of old ones, and wearing them through Aldleigh in the knowledge that she is seen and admired and enviously mocked.

Hanslip’s weakness was a somewhat ostentatious self-presentation. He affected an old-fashioned style, and had had his metabolism tweaked so that he stabilised at about ten per cent overweight: enough to give him a more solid look without requiring frequent adjustments to the heart.

trilby

that her face was sloped and ursine.

trundling

ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time