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“... says. It’s this kind of suggestive reticence that Eliot was reacting to when he remarked that Henry James had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. Along its outer border, the desire not to state ideas explicitly approaches the desire not to have them, as expressed by Flaubert’s ideal of a book about nothing. The obvious alternative to all this ...”

“... king’. Both kings and cockneys, he felt, were very objectionable neighbours in a hotel. Henry James thought the new breed of tourists were ‘rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light to any eminent degree’. Another huge embarrassment was the female mountaineer, sometimes wearing breeches, a sight to attract a hail of ...”

“... included Yeats, with whom, despite their antithetical temperaments, he did theatre business, Henry James, another unkindred spirit, Tolstoy another, Strindberg another, and, nearer home, Gilbert Murray and the lecherous, contentious and extremely able Wells). He worked heroically to keep the Court Theatre going, to overthrow the stage censorship, to ...”

“... her literary education, believing it undignified to go to bed with a woman unless they can read Henry James together. Dora knows plenty about sex, of course, though not as much as her twin, who began with the pantomime goose at the age of 16. The two sisters played the bed-trick on an unsuspecting young man on their 17th birthday, thus developing an ...”

“... so successfully that she became the hostess of a London literary salon frequented by Kipling and Henry James. Hers was a success story, but one wonders whether her other productions are so riddled as this one with hidden fears and desires. The rare achievement is the identification with both sides: the mother’s urge to be free from the exasperating ...”

“... which tilts at the sinister shadowside of the familiar and domestic, reads as though Henry James had updated The Turn of the Screw for the late 20th century. Now in Debatable Land she jousts on against her big windmills: the whys and wherefores of unsettled characters and their off-kilter perceptions and the slippage of their language. She ...”

“... foamed at the mouth, although he had. Small wonder that Flaubert’s genius confined him to what Henry James called the madness of art, since that is exclusive, self-inflicted, entirely wilful and implicit with the grandiosity of the child laying claim to his domain. Francine du Plessix Gray, in this wildly partisan and thoroughly enjoyable biography of ...”

“... fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor ...”

“... Paul Auster is a gifted parodist who does for the thriller and private-eye novel much of what Henry James in Washington Square did for the amorous ...”

“... and ‘atmosphere’ statements to back up dialogue and action, the player creates what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. A rich and diverse narrative (a ‘matrix’, as they like to think of it) is assembled. For many players the ‘role’ (especially in Social MOOs) represents the most exciting element of the game. A ...”

“... in 20th-century America has been Saul Bellow, who stands in relation to this theme rather as Henry James did in relation to the impact of Europe on American consciousness. The mourning of old Europe (Europe before the slaughter) and old America (America before Burger King), and the attempt to establish a continuity between these manageable, familial ...”

“... counters she found the time and place to do so – like Emily Dickinson in collaboration with Henry James.    Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere ...   Sylvie did tell me once that ...”

“... ball’ for which only 400 invitations were sent out. Mrs Astor found it convenient to take it (as Henry James would have said) from McAllister that great wealth could be a substitute for blue blood: it may have flowed in the veins of some of the 400, but the rest were instant aristocrats. What were the values of this new aristocracy, which, in the case ...”

“... uncertainty of the texts of Shakespeare, the walking and dancing of Fred Astaire, the America of Henry James, certain works by Thoreau and Heidegger, scepticism itself, the utterance of passion, the relation between philosophy and collecting, and just what it is that makes Wittgenstein’s work ‘at once attractive and uninheritable within professional ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than ...”