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“... isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ‘old perpetrations’: ‘I think of it, the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this date – that of a rich (so ...”

“... and mostly honourable performer. He could be a witty, sometimes moving memoirist – on Henry James, for instance, or on the mood in London at the declaration of World War One – and several of his essays thoroughly deserve (as he might well have put it) not to be forgotten. Also, when he took the trouble, he was a persuasive ‘close reader’ (see his ...”

“... in some degree by the need to seek out an ancestry for the separation of powers. By contrast, Joyce Appleby’s essay is valuable in large part because it stresses what was un-English about the 18th-century American dream – the abundance of American land. The availability of landed property for a majority of whites enabled men like Jefferson to champion ...”

“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”

“... in England during the reign of Victoria, and living here, doesn’t seem to have helped Henry James or Joseph Conrad. We know quite a lot about them already, of course: but Sutherland’s comments on other only partly Victorian writers like Wells are well worth having, and there would be propriety in offering views of them as Victorian ...”

“... infatuated with the past, don’t square up with 20th-century practice. Lawrence and Joyce held onto their roots even in exile, and there was always MacDiarmid, whose ‘Gairmscoile’ stands the Modernist argument on its head: It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken E’en herts ...”

“... to or falling back upon the established conventions of seriousness, be they the realism of James or the modernism of Joyce?That’s a problem for every generation. Ambitious young writers are always tempted to imitate those verified by authority; the influence of an established writer upon a beginning writer has ...”

“... history appended to The Gates of Ivory is probably only the second of its kind in fiction. (Clive James, as I recall, made the breakthrough a few years ago.) There are chunks of roman à clef, and at least one recurrent character whose description verges on the libellous. Most of it works, with the exception of some of the more portentous utterances about ...”

“... in need of being reconstructed.’ Their generation, he claimed, ‘grew up backwards … We read Joyce before we read Tolstoy. The gods we were told about were Pynchon and high modernism. Experimentation was the norm for us. Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with ...”

“... obfuscations and Proust’s longueurs to join dependable storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was ...”

“... visit to London, where his portrait was painted by William Hilton. Taylor and his business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was pregnant. An announcement of the wedding ...”

“... A decade-long resuscitation began with the 1960 reissue of his collaborative effort with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which galvanised a new generation of social idealists and photographers. Then came the reissue of his book American Photography in 1962; a MoMA exhibition, in 1966, of subway photographs he’d taken in the 1930s and ...”

“... On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell ...”

“... happiness’. Advertising is a social superstructure, and by making Leopold Bloom an ad man, Joyce anticipated the modern world, where a common dream is to brand ourselves, project an attractive corporate image through social media, then stumble on the one meme or clip that will stop the world in its tracks and get us bought: What were habitually his ...”

“... of his creations, or to assume their difference from himself. Beckett no doubt owes this to Joyce, and to the ‘scrupulous meanness’ whereby the author of Dubliners identifies with the men and women he wrote about. But he probably owes a great deal also to Kipling, who was as popular in Ireland as everywhere else, and not just in the Ascendancy ...”