“... 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 ...”

“... is making plans to deal with it. On the matter of reliable life-writing, Roth is surely school of Henry James. ‘There are secrets for privacy and silence,’ James said, ‘let them only be cultivated on the part of the hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of sport – or call it the historic ...”

“... Alexander von Humboldt (echoed by Darwin) exulting over the sublimities of tropical landscapes, James Clerk Maxwell affirming the muscular knowledge derived from experiment, dozens of hardy travellers (including Galton) relishing the sights, sounds and smells of exotic locales. The body of the Victorian scientist was put to work – the long, patient hours ...”

“... According to Nead: ‘The fogs of the 1950s were different … from the fogs of Conan Doyle and Henry James. They drew on the accumulated meanings of the Victorian fogs, but they were also distinctively modern.’ This is, at best, questionable, quasi-anthropomorphic, ascribing to fogs memory and mimetic capacities. Nead goes on to grant meaning to ...”

“... from the perspective of the sons and daughters, rather than that of the migrants themselves. From Henry Roth to Philip Roth, it’s the second or third generation whose experience shapes the fiction of immigration. Brooklyn is unusual in telling the story from the immigrant’s perspective, the more so since Tóibín’s protagonist is ...”

“... Shortly after the death of the third, and in the midst of grief, he slipped down to Howell and James to buy his wife a sealskin coat. He lived a round life, spoke his mind, was spared no difficulty and took his losses. Why shouldn’t he sometimes complain? Indifferent, vain and unreliable as a boy, perpetually late to class at Rugby, Arnold worked ...”

“... Rayleigh, who became head of the Cavendish Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who with his wife Eleanor Balfour founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding ...”

“... and stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the ...”

“... Mentation was all. This phase of Miller’s career was astonishingly productive. For him as for Henry James, Europe made literature discutable. Always fluent, Miller now erupted with articles, books, essays and reviews – almost always prefaced with genuflection to the European sages who had inspired him. Miller has retained two features in his work ...”

“... about J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Melanie Klein, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, Foucault, Henry James and Proust. The book is framed by an ‘interlude, pedagogic’, an autobiographical essay on Sedgwick’s experience of fainting at an Aids protest early in her cancer treatment, and a concluding essay on the pedagogy of Buddhism and the ...”

“... to adulthood. There were two boys, on whom much hope and all the spare money were expended. Henry turned out the Branwell of the family, a drinker who went to America and was erased from family history. Frederic led a quiet life as a minister. It was the sisters who were exceptional and the four eldest, Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa, who made up ...”

“... full of as ifs.’ There are apparently 266 in Great Expectations alone. Where George Eliot and Henry James used analogy to guide interpretation of what a character might be thinking or feeling, in Dickens it is always a performance on the author’s part, a conjuring of unlikely associations (he was a gifted amateur magician). Mullan, however, rightly ...”

“... type of discussion. After many years of comfortable mindless enjoyment of Jane Austen, which even Henry James was inclined to endorse, the pendulum may now swing too far the other way, and the critic present us with an author who is interchangeable with any other modern novel-writing intellect. To suppose her covertly demonstrating, through and by means ...”

“... it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into question. Of course, there was a lot to debunk – and ...”