History, Books to Loathe By, and the Abodes of Production

Mary Beard reproduces Boris Anrep's National Gallery mosaic of Virginia Woolf as Clio the Muse of History, but Woolf's were a common choice when"Critics choose their most-loathed books," London Times, 22 June.

The novelist and fiction reviewer Stephen Amidon names Woolf's The Waves. This"playpoem," says Amidon, is"a putrid morass of unreadability. Beloved of American academics – which ought to tell you something right there – the book fairly accurately simulates the experience of sitting next to a pretentious old windbag on a flight to Australia." The Times book critic John Carey chooses her Orlando:"the acme of Bloomsburyish poppycock, a self-flattering appropriation of English literature and history, distilled from Woolf's temporarily addled brain by the heat of her infatuation for the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. Should be sold with a sick bag attached." The historian David Kynaston nominates Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (2006)."Immaculately edited by Richard Davenport-Hines," says Kynaston, the letters

still made me throw them across, well, only the bed, not the room. It was, after all, a London Library copy. Their self-satisfaction, their snobbishness, above all their petty-minded bitchiness – it was all horribly reminiscent of the aspects of Oxford that had so disenchanted me as an undergraduate more than 30 years ago.

At"Writers' Rooms," Guardian, nd, you can see Eric Hobsbawm's cluttered workroom and the retreat where Leonard told Virginia Woolf that The Waves was"a masterpiece." Hat tip.