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“... games and nibbling at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual ...”

“... In​ the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense seen through Strether’s eyes, there had been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary’ that ‘forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation ...”

“... against this necessary person, regretting but never forgetting that he needed to be pleased. When Henry James sent him a copy of The Spoils of Poynton he told Garnett he imagined ‘with pain the man in the street trying to read it’; ‘the delicacy and tenuity of the thing are amazing,’ but how could it hope to sell? Jessie pretended to admire ...”

“... more variously and with high composure, that there is something more primary than enlightenment. Henry James said of Eugénie de Guérin and her piety, what could not be said of Heaney and his, that she ‘was certainly not enlightened’. Yet when James went on, ‘But she was better than this – she was light ...”

“... to have read more than a hundred books on ancient Carthage before even sitting down to write (Henry James had the sense while reading the novel that there were ‘libraries of books behind his most innocent sentences’). The novel’s air of erudition led a young curator in the Louvre’s Department of Antiquities, Wilhelm Fröhner, to question its ...”

“... creations of past ages had begun in the homes of rich collectors in the previous century. In 1896 Henry James described the way Mrs Gereth had furnished her house at Poynton, ‘written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to ...”

“... she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in ...”

“... The result was what Ezra Pound called ‘Kipling’s “Bigod, I-know-all-about-this” manner.’ Henry James became acquainted with the first Lanchester when it broke down outside his house in Rye, in October 1902. The same vehicle conveyed him, a year later, on a return visit to the Kipling establishment at Bateman’s, in Sussex. During this period ...”

“... On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell ...”

“... These Promenades come from a man who, although he is the most hexagonal* historian in the United Kingdom, is still not recognised at his true worth south of the Channel. Right from the start of his itinerary Cobb gaily mixes everything together. He paints well-behaved Norman children such as one can only dream of meeting these days. He rides his biography backwards, he describes his period as a pion (a supervisor) in boarding-schools run either by priests or by anti-clericals, both of whom were great believers in corporal punishment ...”

“... Auden Digit”.’ Appropriately Greene has dream-meetings not only with notable writers (he meets Henry James on a ‘most disagreeable river trip to Bogota’) but with world statesmen, popes and royalty. Several times he is offered, or given, important appointments. In one dream Edward Heath asks him to serve as Ambassador to Scotland; in another he ...”

“... than she was. One shows her on the veranda of their house in Cornwall, staring down at the plump Henry James, who is lounging on the steps reading. When Leslie Stephen died and the Stephen children escaped to independence in Bloomsbury, Vanessa hung Cameron’s photographs in the white-painted hall: great men – their ...”

“... to the less qualified. Even more subtle novelists than Shriver love their thin characters most: Henry James signals that Mamie Pocock, the most eligible girl in Woollett, Massachusetts will not be the heroine of The Ambassadors when Strether realises that ‘Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty.’ Pandora loves her brother because she knew him ...”

“... none of them particularly amusing: ‘Damn it, here’s another digression.’ If, as Henry James put it, in every novel ‘there is the story of one’s hero’, and ‘the story of one’s story itself’, then the latter is a depressed and self-lacerating one. The most egregious example of Banville’s carelessness is in the novel’s ...”

“... the house magazine of the aesthetic movement, and of which Beardsley was art editor. Articles by Henry James, Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, and other luminaries were overlooked in the outcry at what the Times described as the ‘repulsiveness and insolence’ of Beardsley’s pictures. This time there was nothing overtly sexual in ...”