“... 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 ...”

“... which Suleri fillets, parses and dishes up, not fussily garnished but imbued with Shakespeare, Henry James, Jane Austen, Robert Graves, and the shade of Kipling, who seems also to get a tribute from Mukherjee in the name of the farm dog Shadow, and whose father worked in Lahore. She has the gift she ascribes to her sisters, of taking the world on her ...”

“... but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured ...”

“... Theroux was always an author we felt we could skip. Also, he has that galumphing air which Henry James parodied so mercilessly in The Aspern Papers, of the American abroad who is trying to convince himself that he is going native, but who is actually a predator. The narrator of The Aspern Papers does not realise that any reasonable reader of the ...”

“... to anyone who could find the meaning of the account of Tough guys don’t dance given by the Henry James Professor at New York University, author of The Arts without ...”

“... the 20th, they should come to know and come to terms with a self-conscious sexuality too. Even Henry James, revising The American, first published in 1877, for a new edition in 1907, was moved to be more explicit about the meaning and motion in Newman’s discovery of his attraction to Madame de Cintré. Heath clearly does not like what he sees in ...”

“... Scott, Carlyle, Dickens, Trollope, Clough, Hawthorne, Browning, George Eliot, Hardy, Arnold and Henry James. In many cases, the editors have singled out Hutton in their introductions as outstandingly shrewd and appreciative among contemporary critics. We clearly need to have a new selection of his best essays. Hutton’s concern was always to see how ...”

“... existed it was ideally suited to the needs of a man who wished to live in society but for his art. Henry James, Proust and Degas were all, like Delacroix, supported by it. When they went home it was to a housekeeper and the muse – who, Delacroix wrote, ‘is a jealous mistress. She abandons you at the slightest in fidelity.’ Home was for being ...”

“... an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ...”

“... not attract close attention from Salwak. It is a serious lack; by comparison, the attribution to Henry James of a book called Lesson of the Masters and to Cambridge of a Peterhouse College seem venial slips. Rob Nixon, who lives in New York, is an expatriate South African. Here and there in his book he clearly and reasonably has South Africa in ...”

“... its content, this is an extremely funny book. There are echoes of Ivy Compton Burnett and of Henry James, but Liddell’s voice is oddly affectionate. In the beginning it is clear that Elsa, like the other characters, was driven by good intentions. Married to someone else, she might have done no harm. There is nothing cheap here, no sniping at easy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before her eyes day in and day out.’ Well, wouldn’t it? The general question exercised Henry James, who was inclined to think it perfectly possible, on the evidence of a young friend who had once caught a glimpse of a French family at dinner, and was sure in consequence she could invent a fiction with a French setting. The notion of the clou ...”

“... and desperate, a wild child, a cynical and alarmingly intelligent all-seeing observer. Only in Henry James does one encounter another such riveting portrait of cursed innocence, and Keneally’s Lucy is a more vibrantly warm flesh-and-blood waif than any of the little lost souls in James. Think what you will of the ...”