“... But this must be all wrong; and not only for a comparatively modest talent like Hartley’s. Henry James, as artist, was well aware of what was involved. He teased a friend who interrogated him about the significance of The Turn of the Screw by pointing out that an artist is wiser never to define just what he means when he presents an enigmatically ...”

“... be far better at home, but the mind wants a change. In several of Ian Fleming’s thrillers James Bond (who is much more interested in food and drink than in sex and killing people) derides the lyric menus of the American eatery, promising flaky-fresh sole and dawn-tender steak: he never orders anything with his bourbon but eggs benedict, or scrambled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Stated baldly, the plot of the novel – The Moth, The Darter, The Darter’s enthusiasm for Henry James, Agnes’s love-talk full of poetry, the near kidnapping, the archive, the effortless class slippages – strains credulity. Indeed it bursts credulity at the seams. Of course in a romance it doesn’t strictly matter what’s believable in ...”

“... besides, or in spite of, the ones they depict. This isn’t a new charge – even an admirer like Henry James thought Burne-Jones’s ‘languishing type … savours of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar ...”

“... The convent and its art encourage a sort of contemplation different from that of a museum. Henry James, who visited in 1873, put it well: ‘You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one, you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on ...”

“... 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 ...”