“... Magician is a sort of companion volume to The Master (2004), Tóibín’s celebrated novel about Henry James, and a book similarly preoccupied by the thought that what might normally be construed as psychological damage can turn out to be just what a novelist needs. This is partly a matter of a similarly subterranean homosexual life that never realises ...”

“... In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with life. ‘She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more – just a little longer ...”

“... of Strangers, or Amours de Voyage. But McEwan’s crucial jettisoning is of the name Venice. When Henry James, a hundred years ago, set himself to be yet another lauder of Venice, he launched himself immediately from his title ‘Venice’: ‘It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to ...”

“... divided, than the vigorous High Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that of Henry James and Whistler, what Charles Darwin elsewhere called the ‘tone’ of mind had changed.Darwin turned 69 in February 1878. He felt that ‘large & difficult subjects’ were now beyond him and that ‘considering my age … it will be the more ...”

“... a verbose and patronising diction to match, and presents us with a dog who appears to be reading Henry James. Well, surely is reading Henry James, because when asked what his book is he says, ‘Rr Rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rrf-rrf’, easily scanned as The Princess Casamassima. I never heard a dog joke I didn’t ...”

“... for him. And not necessarily a better reader than you or I or Ms Kappeler: ‘there is nothing in [James’s] prefaces apart from some trivial biographical data of little interest, that we as readers should not be able to trace on our own.’ Ms Kappeler concedes that James is in it somewhere, having initiated the script for ...”

“... involved a cup of tea and a 40-minute chat with a well-read former bookseller who’d studied Henry James with Tony Tanner. She sent me some promising recommendations – William Maxwell, Rohinton Mistry – but I wondered if nearly £2 a minute wasn’t pushing it. (Phone consultations, at £40, are cheaper.) I asked a friend who’d taught a class ...”

“... is, or could be, lived here. Novelists put characters in rooms that give colour to their thoughts. Henry James does it memorably in the first paragraph of The Wings of the Dove: She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face ...”

“... a history painter or illustrator, but not one who turns to the stories of others for subjects. Henry James chose to have the New York edition of his novels illustrated with photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn. They were not strictly speaking illustrations and certainly did not compete with the images the words created, yet they did genuinely enrich ...”

“... In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of an entire ensemble in a few well-chosen words, and of accurately rendering the way dress affects feeling ...”

“... streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps’. These struggles to accommodate what Henry James called ‘our crude and silent past, our garish climate, our deafening present’ to European traditions resulted in a realist tradition which may turn out to be America’s greatest contribution to 19th and 20th-century painting. Professor ...”

“... which was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... it. Put another way, one could say that these sentences are conspicuously unlike the sentences of Henry James, which were the opposite of bald and remarkable for the poetic thickness they could, at their greatest, deliver. The opening sentence of The Wings of the Dove shows how much work a first sentence can do and what it means to talk of fictional ...”

“... to be, as a novelist and critic of societies, the most important import since Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Not least because he so extraordinarily combines their traditions, right down to following James in this book to where T.S. Eliot was mildly shocked to find him, seeking spiritual life in English country ...”

“... penetrate and inhabit the world of the two children in The Turn of the Screw, the world which Henry James suggests so well by so scrupulously declining to enter it, or to ‘understand’. Not that there is anything nightmarish about this late world of Bowen, in the crude sense in which other novelists, Anna Kavan for instance, have drawn such a ...”