“... of prominent artists and writers, since they came bearing a letter of introduction addressed to Henry James by Sargent. They made an odd trio: Pozzi was ‘a famously heterosexual commoner’ and his companions were ‘aristocrats of “Hellenic tendencies”’. The elder was Prince Edmond de Polignac, a composer and bon vivant whom Proust described ...”

“... He died, in fact, while on a final lecture tour in England, collapsing after a reading in St James Hall in March 1870. Nor is Conrad any less misleading about Dickens’s first trip to America. Having served up some ersatz fare about American Notes (‘in Dickens’s nightmarish America, there is emptiness: panic has driven away even the ...”

“... dropped his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James thought that Lang was too ‘insular and innocent’ to appreciate Paris). But he could only afford to be interested in a topic for the time it took to dash off an article about it. As Oxonian contemporaries racked up professorships, he became an ...”

“... fantasy helps to conceal what’s wrong with it. I’m not sure I would connect Wonder Woman with Henry James if DC Comics had not already linked her to Ferdinand Lot, but James did suggest that the outbreak of the First World War taught us to see ‘what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and ...”

“... implement’. In an obituary note written after she finally succumbed to colon cancer in 1897, Henry James paid characteristically equivocal tribute to this most prolific of women writers: ‘from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious treatment.’ His obituary hovered between contempt for helpless female ...”

“... Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça de Queirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote town of northern Portugal, but spent most of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words ...”

“... previous history of womankind.’ Opposition came, strangely, from the liberal scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In reply to a telegram from Herbert Spencer asking support for the burial, Huxley wrote:   It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly with the raking up of past histories, which had better be forgotten. With ...”

“... bathetic. And even when Tomlinson establishes a link with the greatest of all American exemplars, Henry James, it is through the master’s editor, Percy Lubbock, now a faded and pitiable old man, who hires the young poet as his secretary, only to sack him soon afterwards because of his Midlands accent. At all such times the author remains ...”

“... Pierpont Morgan has never said “I” in his life.’ Strouse would agree. ‘He was, as Henry Adams said of Theodore Roosevelt, “pure act”.’ But Schlegel goes on to say, ‘if you could pierce through him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle’, which Strouse wouldn’t say of Morgan. He may lack any very complicated internal ...”

“... Milly disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form ...”

“... about whom Auerbach has particularly interesting things to say. She reminds us that Stoker managed Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre for 20 years, beginning in 1878, and proposes that his Dracula, like Polidori’s Ruthven, was ‘a proud servant’s offering to a great man’. Irving, as she puts it, ‘had spent 1895 lobbying for his knighthood (the first ever ...”

“... of contemporary critics. Compounding with half will please nobody. From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere (1966) and The Performing Self (1971) to Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier has pursued a consistent and inventive enquiry into literary language, and into the politics of literary language. ‘When ...”

“... Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development of his story, which described modern divorce and adultery from the point of view of a young girl ...”

“... in April 1894, and began by announcing the death of the author. Its lead item was a short story by Henry James in which a celebrated writer, Neil Paraday, is pursued by a crew of souvenir hunters and salon-frequenting harpies. ‘The Death of the Lion’ is narrated in the first person by Paraday’s nameless, self-appointed protector, a journalist sent ...”