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“... nothing like the vampiric and castrating Sophie Portnoy. His brother Sandy was and is nothing like Henry Zuckerman. And so on. The family facts are – unusually in Roth’s writing – extraordinarily touching and restrained. The narrative touches briefly on Roth’s beloved baseball: beloved because it was, in the Forties, ‘a great nationalistic church ...”

“... axis. For being a woman in fiction is a serious matter, and it was the men, from Richardson to Henry James, who recognised the fact, and portrayed women in a proper isolation, and therefore a proper individuality. Emily – the ‘only’ Brontë, according to the Leavises – was not a bit interested in the seriousness and exclusiveness of being a ...”

“... of ideological complacence. On the contrary: her prose is always in too much of a rush (her cousin Henry Holland called her charming letters ‘a heterogeneous mass of nonsense’) ever to calm down and show itself pleased with itself. What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen ...”

“... interest in the collection and presentation of minute facts impressed one of his Glasgow auditors, James Boswell, whose marvellous accumulation. The Life of Samuel Johnson, is a major peak in the Scottish eclectic tradition. In Edinburgh, formulating the canon of the new university study of English Literature, Blair tried to inscribe a marked Scottish ...”

“... London. There Mary found new goals – and new mentors. Pattison’s place was taken by ‘beloved Henry James’, who took to her, in a puzzled sort of way – ‘somehow, I don’t, especially when talking art and letters, communicate with her worth a damn. All the same, she’s a dear.’ James inspired un-Arnoldian ...”

“... and the house was no longer troubled by spirits. As Clarke points out, this could be an M.R. James or Sheridan le Fanu story. One detail – the house was suspiciously cheap for its size – features in countless modern ghost stories of the Amityville type. There are, according to Clarke, eight main categories of ghostly phenomenon: traditional ghosts ...”

“... through the adult narrator’s ability to interpret the nature of that knowing to the reader. Henry James offers a master-class in point-of-view in his preface to the novel: I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest her with perceptions easily and almost infinitely ...”

“... happen, passions ignite and history refuses to be buried. A more obvious connection is with Henry James, about whom Tóibín wrote a great novel, The Master (2004), in which one set-piece has James taken by a gondolier to deposit the clothes of his newly deceased friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, in the ...”

“... take our places at the dinner table at Salisbury Court in November 1583, ‘as in a late novel by Henry James’: ‘who had done what, who knew who had done what, and who knew who knew who had done what.’ Suspicion hung over the scene like a November fog, already a problem in Elizabethan London. (Those making a film of this book will want to know ...”

“... James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. After spells in the US as a teenager, London as a young adult, he returned to Glasgow, where he now lives and works. Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1956. She worked in Ayrshire as a schoolteacher until recently, when she started making enough money from her writing to give up teaching and move to Glasgow ...”

“... famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that Marlowe ...”

“... these brief and penetrating fables, Philippe Sollers’s Women lands with the dull thud of what Henry James would have called a loose baggy monster, though the publishers describe it as a ‘post-modernist odyssey’. Women is, if not exactly experimental, a stylistic oddity since it consists of a 550-page monologue foregoing syntax and sentence ...”

“... with a large question of the Will coming in, sometimes alarmingly, and particularly interesting to Henry James. In The Bostonians he put this exchange between Olive Chancellor, the intense young spinster, and Verena Tarrant, the easy-going, delightfully Mozartian creature who can be so fervently eloquent at feminist meetings, and who will eventually be ...”

“... the last phrase that was spoken to them. In this mode they recall not Ibsen and Chekhov but Henry James, who could create a riddle out of any old banality: ‘Well, I see everyone at my place.’ ‘Everyone?’ The trouble with such instant creation of depths is that the whole world looks shallow after a while. Is The Cryptogram shallow? It’s ...”

“... of Chekhov’s plays is not unique. Shakespeare’s begin and in a sense end as stories; Henry James could not write for the stage, but produced tales and novels which have taken to it in a way which would have startled and perhaps discomposed him, even though he claimed in his Notebooks, after his own theatrical debacle, that the disaster had ...”