“... and ‘vaguely’ and ‘somehow’ veers into a calibration of subtlety that calls to mind Henry James in the overripeness of his final phase. This novel is indeed Jamesian to the core, in its writerly concern with being a writer and in its attention to interpersonal perception, which is sometimes as complex as ...”

“... I think.’ Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the ...”

“... of Edinburgh and thirty miles north of the English border, which her great-great-great-grandfather James and his family left in 1818. Much painstaking research must lie behind the facts assembled here; even so, she seems able to reach back with exceptional ease, accessing not only the usual meagre birth and marriage and death dates, but rich resources of ...”

“... I went​ to Henry Poole & Co, the oldest tailor on Savile Row, for a fitting. Suits start at £5500, and I couldn’t afford to have one made, but the firm had agreed to teach me the principles of bespoke tailoring by measuring me for an invisible one, so I could at least engage in the fantasy: the emperor’s new clothes ...”

“... the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William ...”

“... out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt’. Geldzahler, a ‘happily ...”

“... to come in throughout Mackenzie’s writing career, many from unexpectedly distinguished sources. Henry James may well have been influenced by Mackenzie’s good looks. He had been so swept away by Rupert Brooke’s appearance that it had been quite a relief to be told he was not a very good poet. But about Mackenzie he was rhapsodic, considering him by ...”

“... at last to be seen in Britain, is a disconcerting venture into territory somewhere between Henry James, Jouhandeau and Hammer Films, I find it less of a disappointment than Truffaut’s far more orthodox trifle, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. Are we nervous for Truffaut because he charms us? His first ‘big’ film (it in fact had a small ...”

“... were to marry, respectively, the politician Geoffrey Howe (now Lord Howe) and the architect James (later Sir James) Stirling’. Sometimes whole sentences seem designed merely to boast of good breeding: the good looks of the young Candida, Hillier announces, ‘rivalled those of the most stunning women ...”

“... novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an ...”

“... Horses was the final word on John Grady did not understand that McCarthy was working according to James Baldwin’s definition of a successful novel, in which the novelist ‘walks the reader to the guillotine without his knowing it’. In the Border Trilogy, McCarthy borrowed the standard tropes of the Western – taciturn cowboys adventuring with their ...”

“... fulfilled in a very different spirit. The offensive title of this book is taken from a letter of Henry James. What right had James to patronise Hardy, and why should Salter think it worth repeating? Salter’s aim is admittedly to cut Hardy down to size – he thinks the reputation exaggerated, particularly that of ...”

“... his bedazzled readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the ...”

“... Irish referred to the ‘English’ then rather than the ‘British’, a term favoured by James I but not by his English subjects, who in those days rejected it as firmly as the Scots, Welsh and Irish reject it today.) We can guess what Kipling felt about the founding of the Irish Free State, always referred to by Honor Tracy, herself aggressively ...”

“... than to Dickens’s own contemporaries, tentatively sketching the scene in oil or watercolour. For Henry James, less cinematic, more plangent, the appeal of the ruins along the Appian Way ‘seems ever to arise out of heaven knows what depths of ancient trouble’. James confessed to taking a ‘perverse’ pleasure in ...”