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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ask me to explain exactly why. The critic whose burden of organicism most resembles Bayley’s is Henry James, who had a very sure sense of the novelistic ideal and a very sure sense of how many novels failed to approach it. James’s aestheticism, hostile to Tolstoyan looseness, is different from Bayley’s – which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from it. It is in any case very European, and has no American equivalent, even where writers like Henry James have thought it desirable to produce one. This peculiar ‘death of the subject’ may account for some of the fascination Benjamin has had for several generations of left intellectuals, by lending the interests and commitments of the absent ...”

“... the verbal meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have ...”

“... the front-liners who actually lived through or died in that ‘abyss of blood and darkness’ (Henry James). In one of his most telling sequences, Fussell reported on a visit to the Somme. Finding it, in the early Seventies, ‘a peaceful but sullen place, un-forgetting and unforgiving’, he tried to conjure some picture of what it might have been ...”