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“... and outside, temperate and tropical, man-made and natural. ‘A complex of few interweavings’ is Henry James’s curtly paradoxical summary of the Florida scene. Heavy, stagnant air and violent hurricanes. Paradisiac contentment and accesses of sudden panic. The strange recumbent crescent moons. The deep shadows in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping ...”

“... of the backpacking generation’. Not all ladies have become women. In a chapter here on P.D. James, Martin Priestman records her distrust of ambitious professional women, approval of loyal housekeepers and disdain for people who say ‘toilet’ when they mean ‘lavatory’. At one point she feels the need to remind herself that not everyone wants to ...”

“... Dorothy however remains, not nebulous exactly, but enigmatic. The odd anecdote – for instance, James Laughlin’s of 1965 about how she advanced his education in Rapallo by reading to him the stories of Henry James – brings her momentarily into focus, but then she disappears again behind a smokescreen of gracious ...”

“... her to jib at the word ‘stream’ when May Sinclair, writing of her novels in 1918, used William James’s ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe them. ‘Pool’, she thought, would have done better. She began writing Pilgrimage in 1913, the year when The White Peacock and Du Côté de Chez Swann were published and a year before. Dubliners came out. Her ...”

“... though not only there. Long after he had stopped writing novels we find Forster explaining why Henry James fell short of his ideal: ‘There is no philosophy in the novels, no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all.’ Forster’s novels contain, in some form, all the ingredients cited ...”

“... his gift for showmanship and his Paris education to make himself the prototype Victorian aesthete, James McNeill Whistler had started out as a dutiful son, following his father to West Point before turning his back on the Army to pursue the artist’s life in Paris. He arrived there in 1855, at the height of the craze for the vie de bohème, and like many ...”

“... do indeed start with an intent adolescent watcher of a Mafia hangout, a young Irish-Italian named Henry Hill, and his fascination does lead him to a compromising involvement in illegality and a witnessing of horrific violence. He undergoes something of an ordeal and he too ends by extricating himself from the guilt of his actions and co-operating with the ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... the loop of time!”.’ Bayley distinguished between those writers – he had Virginia Woolf and Henry James in mind – upon whom ‘a passionate and omnivorous interest in life’ is laid as a sacred duty, and other writers – Tolstoy and Jane Austen sustained this quality – who are too far inside life to find it ‘interesting’. The art of ...”

“... not with the Laurentian astonishingness, the clairvoyant, deep-striking and wide-ranging genius, [James] is, as critic, finely and strongly central.’ Some might find this bullying or hectoring; I, too, find it so in the abstract; yet it does keep alive a certain vocabulary, it makes us think again before discarding those words and trying for a less overt ...”

“... of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. There are virtuoso pages like 71, where Henry James and Edmund Gosse bicycle through the text (‘Those were bicycle times ... The Time Machine with its saddle was itself a transfigured bicycle. Wells’s third novel The Wheels of Chance (1896), had been all about bicyclists’). The book offers a ...”

“... McGurl, a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature before Henry James, ascribing to the American postwar era various creative ‘innovations’ that actually date back hundreds of years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat ...”

“... trying to baptise several Salem ministers who promptly had him put in an asylum for a month); and Henry David Thoreau (and if Emerson was Arctic, what zone can we designate for the glacial Thoreau? Emerson himself said: ‘As for taking Thoreau’s arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree’). There were also the various members and guests of the ...”

“... with her writer parents and the people she met in their living room in New York: Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or ...”

“... newspaper column, that secular sermonette. A lament for the well-meaning replacement of the King James Bible by more narrowly relevant versions reads like a transplanted think-piece. A passage describing the technicalities of roofing (‘with slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees – with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or even ...”