“... and above all money, about whose source once again a high degree of generality was imperative. Henry James never specified the source of the Newsome fortune in The Ambassadors, and the apocryphal story – the production of chamberpots – is perhaps just another fable about form and content. For even if money in general could easily be translated ...”

“... When Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, the embarrassed author remarked that at least some of the audience was clapping. These approvers were powerless to out-clamour the ‘hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs’, whose roars were ‘like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo’, but for James they represented ‘the forces of civilisation ...”

“... an out-of-date beau and a not-yet-in-date subject of the once in a while and future king whom Henry James will christen Edward the Caresser. And at the centre of the novel is Professor Horace Nettleship, banked and glowering, a man whose geological hammer has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous parachronism of ...”

“... the great Ellington protégé, was living there – presumably composing – in the 1990s. James Schuyler arrived in 1979 and wrote out his last years there. The Chelsea’s presiding spirit in the 19th century was Philip Gengembre Hubert, the son of a French Fourierist who took him to America as the New World phalansteries were breaking up. Hubert, a ...”

“... and his eyes twinkled in the classic Frenchman’s delight in talk of les femmes. I told him about Henry James dictating his last novels to a woman named Theodora (Gift of God) Bosanquet. He said he was very fond of Henry James. I’d just been rereading The Golden Bowl, and saw it suddenly as a Derridean cat’s ...”

“... good reason that many people who actually knew him, including someone with so good a judgment as Henry James, found him utterly charming. The charm, if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was ...”

“... one he cared most about, though A Christmas Garland is probably his best: Edmund Gosse reported Henry James as calling it ‘the most intelligent thing that has been produced in England for many a long day’. Several of these letters defend the climax of Zuleika, when the undergraduates commit mass suicide for love of the heroine. With ...”

“... English. Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James, all qualifications and revisions, no assertion that can’t be infinitely embroidered or unravelled. But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, brand-names and underwear we connect with a quite ...”

“... and Mississippi River lore, as is Walden of New England nature and Faulkner of the South; in Henry James the tendency takes the form of connoisseurship. In all these cases the implication is that reality cannot stand on its own, but requires the services of an expert to convey or unlock its meaning. The converse of this is no less true, that ...”

“... back to? Tolstoy’s late parables coerce us, of course; but they also touch our lives with what Henry James, in his Notebooks, called ‘something important, something intimate, something vital’. Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm is suggestive, as Carter’s The Passion of New Eve is suggestive. But Ozick’s fable suggests life, and ...”

“... of the divorce reform act of 1857; in ‘monogamous countries’, the Oxford philosophy professor Henry Mansel noted in a review of 24 sensation novels in an 1863 issue of the Quarterly Review, the obsession with bigamy served as ‘a vehicle of mysterious interest or poetic justice’. Few of the novels Mansel reviewed are still read, but Lady Audley’s ...”

“... father, wrongly, claims his great-granddaddy was). In the unrevised version, an elderly Senator, James Burden Day, a recurring character, is surprised to discover himself still capable of arousal: ‘at a time when he thought himself altogether free of the demands of the flesh, he had become like a boy again, or almost.’ In the rewritten version, ‘it ...”

“... philosophising guaranteed his implacable exclusion from it. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated comment on Henry James – ‘a mind so fine that no idea can violate it’ – sounds like a crafty backhanded compliment but in fact represents, from the virulently anti-intellectualist Eliot, the sincerest praise. The un-Christian Lawrence believed devoutly in the ...”

“... Washington, and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is one to speak?’ Which, indeed? One matter which ...”

“... Arcade to the Rue de Rivoli? A man who expected English hostesses to know who and what he meant by Henry James? I think not. This whole memoir has the hot, concocted fragrance of the Casement diaries. (It will be recalled that Claud Cockburn, much-admired with the rest of his family by Ben Sonnenberg, proposed that those diaries were not a forgery, but ...”