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“... is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion,’ Henry James said of Our Mutual Friend. It is inconceivable that a reviewer now would dare to say anything like that about any novel that is published. Both unreadability and mere readability are taken as signs of unusual talent, and if you look at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The only tutor to develop any emotional bond with Bertie, a handsome former Eton master called Henry Birch, was sacked by Albert for not being Presbyterian enough and for himself being found to have an unsatisfactory skull when the phrenologist was called to examine it. Albert kept setting Bertie tasks at which he couldn’t fail to disappoint. When he was ...”

“... One will look at the books in the rack with a new respect now that one knows their origins in Henry James and Nietzsche. The principle on which Mills & Boon runs its list is that the imprint is always greater than the author. Over the years, the firm has built up a stable of romancers several of whom (like Jean S. Macleod) have a hundred or more ...”