“... years ago. Washington DC dwells on the tangled family relationships of two ageing power-brokers, James Burden Day, a Democratic senator, and Blaise Sanford, a newspaper publisher. The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but ...”

“... Adams’s script the two playwrights complicate the mutual attraction developed while co-writing Henry VI by flirting with the possibility of betraying and/or killing each other, for reasons never satisfactorily explained by some clunky passages of political exposition. While their imagined relationship owes something to that between Mephistopheles and ...”

“... of realistic narrative. Yet if you require a novel to be one entire and perfect chrysolite in the Henry James manner, Durrell is a non-starter. His fiction is made up of wildly different elements which there is no attempt to harmonise. He has ebullient moods and phases, and he wants to get them all in. There are the great descriptive set-pieces, often ...”

“... me fall in love with the dynamics of history: The Forsyte Saga, Buddenbrooks and The Education of Henry Adams. I discovered Adams’s autobiography last, when it headed the preparatory reading list, alphabetically organised, that I was sent in advance of arriving at university. (I still haven’t got round to the other autobiography in the As, Saint ...”

“... The distinction he is secretly making throughout the book becomes explicit in his essay on Henry Green: Some very fine artists impose themselves, but Henry Green belonged to those who masochistically seek to let their characters speak through them. In so speaking, they may expose more than they know; but don’t we ...”

“... a spade a spade’, against the local vicar’s advice. Witter Bynner is a more wily bird. James Kraft’s selection of his letters presents him in a good light and few would claim to ‘see through’ him, as we think we see through Neville. Bynner’s comments on The Plumed Serpent seem just and gentlemanly. He challenges, without malice, the tone of ...”

“... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the ...”

“... made us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and ...”

“... I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer than James Buchan. I can’t think of anyone who concedes so much of his own intelligence to his protagonists – doesn’t mock or belittle them – and gives them so much world to do battle with. I see no particular limitation to his scope or style: his stunningly curt dialogues and ravishing recitatives are equally persuasive ...”

“... propriety which a master of the genre can manipulate to reveal everything that lies beneath. Henry James and Ivy Compton-Burnett knew exactly how to do this, and they were the exceptions in not complaining of the censorship to which they were subjected by the standards of the philistine bourgeoisie. The writer who offers his own version of a ...”

“... others, some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing ...”

“... art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly ...”

“... shelves; worried that they’ll disappear altogether, the narrator attempts to memorise Keats and Henry James. The National Gallery is cleared of paintings. A child asks ‘What’s a newspaper?’, never having seen one (a plausible enough scenario in our own world). The first manifestations of ‘they’ are surreptitious: a strange couple stay ...”

“... A system devised for the analysis of Russian folk-tales can be adapted to the later novels of Henry James. The microscopic machinery of phonemic analysis can be blown up to the macroscopic scale and used to examine the structure of narrative. And endless fascinating variations can be discovered in practically anything by applying what the French (but ...”

“... of narration is as artless as it looks, or whether it is really very artful. Nothing is what Henry James would call ‘treated’: all is simply reported, in a lively one-thing-after-the-other fashion. There are echoes of Frances Trollope, echoes of Huckleberry Finn – probably quite accidental; and the whole is so alive, original and unexpected ...”