“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that it reinstated a godlike Cartesian cogito. ‘From the theoretical point of view,’ James Miller quotes him as saying, ‘Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something which is given to us; but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves – to be truly our self.’ One feels inclined to ...”

“... death is fleeing the frame on the right. There are no such illusions – another surprise – in James Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket ...”

“... count as hard evidence, but some of it is persuasive. There was, for instance, an article by one James Harrison in 1884 on this subject, and under the heading ‘Specimen Negroisms’ he included the following: Ef I’d a knowed = if I had known To light out fer = to run for And true enough, these are to be found in Huck’s famous closing statement: ‘if ...”

“... to the modern world as China and India, has implications for how we see American literature. Henry James may have lamented the social thinness of American history, and its apparent inability to generate great writing, but Stein’s formulation makes James look like an incorrigible 19th-century Europhile who failed ...”

“... labels make them sound; Waters is not at all one of those writers setting out to profit from what Henry James called the ‘fatal cheapness’ of period fiction. Her work is always rich in feeling, and clever, and precise. That Waters has decided to move her historical interests on is courageous, but not surprising. The wonderful Fingersmith surely took ...”

“... Lizst had played for him; he had helped Marconi to transmit the first transatlantic radio signal; Henry James, ‘tears in his eyes’, would come running to him with a novelistic problem; Escoffier said he could ‘learn cooking’ from Ford. If Conrad, in a temper, banged his fist on the table and made the teacups jump, Ford must say that he threw the ...”

“... from St Elizabeths in 1958, and then, in 1967, his extensive and fascinating correspondence with James Joyce. But it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the archive floodgates really opened. These decades saw the appearance of volumes individually devoted to Pound’s letters not only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox ...”

“... to allow itself a more Dickensian amplitude. As Wells made clear in his famous dispute with Henry James, he did not draw a sharp line between ‘literature’ and journalism or social analysis (James memorably articulated the case for Art with a capital A), nor did he worry overmuch about where the line should be ...”

“... even under the dehumanising effects of such suffering, literary style remains true to the man. Henry James, who in his last illness, believed he was Napoleon, and gave orders, not for the field of war, but for the redecoration of the Tuileries, is ‘smitten with a violent attack of the atrocious affection known as “shingles” ’. Sydney Smith ...”

“... of Webb’s houses – he was largely a domestic architect – were built for men like Morris and James Beale, the owner of Standen, who got their money from industry, business and the professions and had no roots in the land, however vocal their attachment to it. At the start of Webb’s career there was still hope for a revival of farming and country ...”

“... Westerly Terrace’ (Stevens’s home address in Hartford), which takes its epigraph from Henry James (‘His alter ego “walked”–’) and begins:In the house the house is allhouse and each of its authorspassing from room to roomShort eclogues as one mightsay on tiptoe do not infringeHowe is reworking Stevens’s ‘The House Was Quiet and ...”

“... It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.             Henry James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there a history of silence?    Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Literary history? Can there still be people who believe in it – or them: literature, history, literary history? Are not all texts on the same level, just texts? Is history not something synchronic, merely a different way of talking about language? The views implied by these rhetorical questions seem wrong to many people, myself included ...”