“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... function of aimless thought? There is a marvellous example of the authenticity of random memory in Henry IV, Part 2. In a famous scene in the tavern at Eastcheap, Mistress Quickly is trying to get Falstaff to pay his debts. He feigns not to remember that he has borrowed money from her and she launches into a tirade: Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt ...”

“... that he is read on a different scale from most of his contemporaries; McEwan is fond of quoting Henry James to the effect that the only obligation of a novel ‘is that it be interesting’. Yet you only have to think of James to realise that there are many more subtle, and perhaps more rewarding, ways of being ...”

“... letters, Lawrence was best-known as the author of Sons and Lovers (an aspirant who, according to Henry James, might be seen ‘lagging in the dusty rear’ of Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie), of another banned book, and perhaps also of a third unpublishable one. Yet he was a genius, not only in his own eyes but in the opinion of many discriminating ...”

“... order to live. When Kermode writes of the imagination of happiness, he is adapting a phrase from Henry James; and when he writes, in relation to the work of Ishiguro, of the imagination of disaster, he is quoting the phrase he previously adapted. Happiness, as we have seen, or the very thought of it, involves disaster, since it is so soon overtaken by ...”

“... figures who recreated modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by the idea that in place of ...”

“... the past two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism ...”

“... entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from ...”

“... different. Then Robb, I feel sure, quite misunderstands a letter written on 22 February 1884 by Henry James to John Addington Symonds, apropos of an article of his own about Italy which he had sent to Symonds. James writes: I sent it to you because it was a constructive way of expressing the goodwill I felt for you ...”

“... at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want ...”

“... concluding chapter shows. But his own start has a confident and deceptive obliqueness worthy of Henry James. He opens with lay-out, and with an example of the mismatching of lay-out, tone and content which is the more telling because it plays on what every reader unthinkingly knows: Pamper yourself with the Archduke Trio Go on – put it on ... From ...”

“... this way or cabbages spaced just so.Picture gardens tend to put painters off. In The Tragic Muse Henry James describes the reaction of a young painter called Nick Dormer to a garden of that sort. Nick feels himself ‘catch the smile’ of ‘named and numbered acres’. He appreciates that they have a ‘charm to which he had not perhaps hitherto done ...”

“... like that seems to have gone on with Ian Fleming. One could hardly say that his fantasy life with James Bond was a case of straightforward compensation. Employers courted him; he charmed the bosses; girls fell over each other to get to bed with him. Or so it seemed, and still seems to his latest biographer, who knew him fairly well in the wartime naval and ...”

“... Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and more than a touch of Henry James. In a letter to her father, Lawrence wrote of his wish to ‘snatch’ a fleeting moment of beauty before the inevitable ‘change’ took place. The whole effect is, at least to modern tastes, quite revolting.Degas’s Miss Murray is ...”