“... 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 ...”

“... today to read a book written a hundred years ago than it is for us to read T.S. Eliot or Henry James. This is particularly the case with a writer like Nescio, who was committed to reformed spelling, including reforms that never took root. To take a sentence at random from ‘Little Poet’: En toen werti zoo kwaad op alle levende en doode ...”

“... attracted a great deal of attention in the United States. In the New York Times Book Review, Caryn James observed that ‘while the English fuss about poets’ graves, Americans gossip about litigation and celebrity journalists.’Malcolm sees biographers and readers allied in a transgressive and titillating conspiracy against the dead. She writes that ‘the ...”

“... James Kelman’s fifth novel, Translated Accounts, is also his first to be delivered entirely in English. In the three novels he published between 1984 and 1989, Kelman mixed Scots and English, with Scots used to convey characters’ speech and states of mind while English handled action and certain, often more formal, types of discourse ...”

“... of passing on her heritage – her knowledge of Richardson, Fielding, Jane Austen, Trollope and Henry James. Apart from Henry Green, Graham Greene and Adrian Bell, it seems that she hadn’t much use for contemporary authors. She was addicted to Scrabble and ‘Words from a word’, which she played with herself on ...”

“... mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and ...”

“... yet having found one’s voice’. Perhaps one really should stick to one’s strongest genre, as Henry James found out when he was hissed off the stage as a playwright. Most fine writers are known for excelling in one particular category: those like Pushkin, who wrote everything from erotic poetry to a history of Pugachev’s rebellion, or Goethe, who ...”

“... a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his ...”

“... these essays. Thus in the admirable book on Kipling there suddenly comes: ‘We owe great debts to Henry James, to Percy Lubbock, to F.R. Leavis, but we have moved away to use, if we wish, fable and word play and farce and alienation, innumerable dexterities of presentation, a wider range of depths and shallows than they allowed for, a consciousness that ...”

“... and almost beautiful.’ There’s a moment in Rebel without a Cause, when Jim Stark (played by James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) climb up to an old Hollywood mansion that’s now lying empty. They pretend they’re going to live there together, with Jim and Judy as the ‘parents’ in this haunted house. Plato mimics an estate ...”

“... In the 1910s Cather was a minimalist from the cornfields, a bright spot in the long shadow of Henry James. Her sentences were lucid, patient, imagistic. Like her contemporaries Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, she picked a fight with smalltown America. But smalltown America has always forgiven her, because Cather always also wanted to celebrate ...”

“... Or the Reverend William A. Smith, who defended slavery on ‘racial grounds’. Or the Reverend James Warley Miles, who also ‘preferred racial to class grounds’. In a chapter on the political economy of the Old South the authors note that everyone who discussed the issue conceded that slave labour was less efficient than free labour. But those same ...”

“... manages to acquire and preserve a face of his own’. Few Americans have faces, Auden says, citing Henry James (‘So much countenance and so little face’): ‘to have a face … one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.’ We can see why Auden was ...”