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“... 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 ...”

“... to a plan which has been turned through 45 degrees – became fashionable. Some architects (James Sterling, for example) presented schemes using axonometrics which complicate things further by showing structures from below. Post-Modernism has changed all that and perspectives are once again respectable. Paintings, rather in the manner of Canaletto, by ...”

“... and wrote part of it down, the fragment of Weir of Hermiston. Ian Bell – like Jenni Calder and James Pope-Hennessy – has written a biography as readable as a romance. Not that Bell surrenders anything to the romantic stereotypes that cluster round RLS. On the dark pockets of Stevenson’s life, he takes a very sober line. In reaction to Balfour’s ...”

“... the books in his excellent library and met at his table such great men as Browning, Tennyson and Henry James. Gregory was regarded as a fair landlord, and it has been conjectured that this regrettably unusual reputation was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic ...”

“... memory that is both affectionate and scornful, runs like an underground current through his work. Henry James and Lenny Bruce are often taken to be Roth’s improbably paired patron saints, but it is possible to add Eleanor Roosevelt to the gallery – or at least Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson, whose names are ...”

“... from the diaries and letters already available. The early novels reflect Barbara Pym’s love for Henry Harvey, whom she met at Oxford; her alternately anguished and wry but unrewarded pursuit of him is affectingly revealed in the pre-war section of A Very Private Life, and it is touching to find that he visited her in hospital in Oxford three days before she ...”