“... off from New York to Ireland to find out whether or not he is the great-great-grandson of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Jamie’s father had once halfheartedly tried this, but he wasn’t prey to a sufficiently insatiable hunger for the quest. But then it is Jamie, not his father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in an heirloom daguerrotype which ...”

“... wise, white witch of the Palais Royal, most earthy of oracles’) and in pieces on Updike, Balzac, Henry James, written with an authority and perception based on lifelong intimacy. He applied the same seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence; he was for years Conrad’s indispensable prop; he was close to his revered Henry James, though perhaps less close than he thought. He was on companionable terms with Wells, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the ungrateful Hemingway. Throughout his life he strove to keep up with les jeunes; Lawrence called him ‘everybody’s blessed ...”

“... but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has always got her nose in Henry James or D.H. Lawrence, becomes as fastidious about books as Hartnell, Mattli and Stiebel had taught her to be about tailoring, and moans if she finds herself on holiday with nothing to read. Her own writing is more in the style of, say, Isse Miyake: a ...”

“... was more than outweighed by highly respectable contributions from the likes of Edmund Gosse, Henry James and even John Buchan. Yet many of the illustrations did shock and even revolt, and Lane was to sack Beardsley when the backwash from the Wilde scandal hit the Bodley Head. ‘Wilde!’ wrote Lambert, in one of his few stylistic lapses. ‘The ...”

“... in leaving the train at the station where she was expected and, engrossed in a book (‘my little Henry James’) or deep in a doze, would be carried triumphantly beyond it. Whoever had driven in to meet her would then have to return, depressed by a sense of anti-climax, to await a panic-stricken telephone call from Devizes or somewhere even further ...”

“... knew – ‘deep in her heart’, in Fitzgerald’s words – that she was better than they were. Henry James would have been greatly taken with the theme of a character with such a strong and outgoing will who yet remained totally and securely imprisoned in a family setting and background. Not that she had a sheltered life. Her younger brother died by ...”

“... make it essential reading. Borges’s reported judgment that Browning was as fine a storyteller as Henry James is not so odd. We should thank John Fuller, when he follows both these difficult masters, for reminding us what the literrary imagination can do in confronting the ineffable. Some of the poems in Lies and Secrets are long and even garrulous, but ...”

“... such matters or even to have come to disapprove of them, but in his notebooks for 12 January 1895, Henry James writes: Note here the ghost story told me at Addington ... by the Archbishop of Canterbury ... the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house ... The servants, wicked and ...”

“... appearance, a page or two later, is that of Jane Morris as painted by Rossetti (or as described by Henry James): ‘carnal, as the massive white throat testifies … there was almost oriental blue richness, blackness, in the king-fisher wings or waves of hair which overshadowed ce beau visage blanc so abundantly.’One practical solution might be for each ...”

“... tentatively around an absence, and in doing so, begins to give the absence shape. In August 1914, Henry James wrote to a friend, the novelist Rhoda Broughton: ‘The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara – yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ...”

“... the reader is required to do his or her fair share of the work, even though the share isn’t, as Henry James said it should be, ‘quite half’. It consists of two separate narratives, the first fictional, the second autobiographical. Common to both is a preoccupation with the destructive impact of war on ordinary happiness. The first part is a ...”

“... adolescence of the contemporary Western male’. It shamelessly deployed Descartes, Hegel, Henry James, Isaac Babel and the Naqba as fodder for the rom-com exploits of its protagonists. Mark – an unmoored PhD student obsessed with Russian history, literature, beer and women – justifies sleeping with someone he doesn’t much care for by ...”

“... that ‘good’ writers ‘deal with issues of life and death’, pointedly excluding the likes of Henry James and Proust. By this standard Han has to be one of the good ones – though it’s hard to imagine McCarthy’s fans gravitating towards her. She, too, is preoccupied by the brutality of the natural world and the state (her novel Human Acts ...”

“... but the publication of John Updike’s selected letters, masterfully assembled and presented by James Schiff, doesn’t appear to have been the parade event that might have been expected. The reviews have been largely laudatory, marbled with tribute to Updike’s impeccable filigree, effortless versatility, unfaltering application and sleek plumage, but I ...”