“... 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 ...”

“... the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and James, Proust and Joyce are adepts who immolate themselves on the altar of their own art, gathering profane experience into the artifice of eternity. For Leavis, the most precious novel is one which reflects a ‘reverent openness before Life’, and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abuse at the hands of her father.) And then there is Baxter, contingency personified, who enters Henry Perowne’s life in Saturday through that most random of urban events, the car accident. Trauma, in McEwan’s work, inaugurates a loss of innocence. After the mother’s death, the childhood garden is cemented over, in his first novel, and the ...”

“... and her daughter, and also (intermittently) by the novelist, who provides us with an epigraph from Henry James. Harriet in Jamesian parlance is ‘begging off from full knowledge’, and ‘making the experiment of living with closed eyes’. She settles too quickly for material wealth for herself, while doing nothing to shield her daughter from the ...”

“... dramatic sketch for Rayner Heppenstall and the Third Programme, for instance, which featured Henry James being driven in Turn of the Screw country in Edith Wharton’s car, and catching sight of the notice MOTORISTS! BEWARE OF THE CHILDREN. Nice to feel that a past could consist almost wholly of anecdotes, and of a self constructed by their ...”

“... she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry James, for example, are full of a sexual desire he has ‘forgotten’ in this sense, that is, neither shouted out nor encrypted nor entirely repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction ...”

“... about it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) we don’t think much about it. Henry James is not the first writer to have been impressed yet baffled by Pierre Loti. Anatole France, who called him the ‘sublime illiterate’, believed that, of all their contemporaries, he was ‘the most sure to last’. To his peers Loti was a ...”

“... in the feminist pantheon. More important, perhaps, these biographies illustrate the point that Henry James made when writing the life of his friend William Wetmore Story, aptly quoted by Virginia Surtees as her epigraph: ‘To live over people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying ...”

“... to bear. ‘Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them,’ Henry James wrote in his preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew. ‘Their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.’ This is also true of not so ...”

“... arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her 21st birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot and the redoubtable Brontë ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin ...”

“... of age. An accomplished novelist of manners, Claire Messud writes in the tradition of Jane Austen, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, even nods to Austen through one of its plots, which involves a vicar and a spinster; its other plot, however, recounts the adventures of an Australian divorcée among the expatriates ...”

“... cover, we learn that he managed a family farm: he must have been the observing writer on whom, as Henry James prescribed, ‘nothing is lost.’ He must have seen some of these things, or something like them, and guessed others, inventing out of experience. This degree of convincing inwardness couldn’t come from anything so unsatisfactory as ...”

“... we know from Youth that Coetzee was at one stage fascinated by, though not altogether happy with, Henry James, who might have raised problems of that sort. ‘Something sounds wrong,’ the cousin complains; but they go ahead anyway. She reports that as a result of Coetzee’s mechanical ineptness she once found herself stranded on the veld with him, on ...”