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“... the eyrie of objective fact – as Jeremy Treglown does very effectively in his biographies of Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett, as Rosemary Hill does in her magical biography of Pugin – but to me a lively new aspect of the form is to be found in the work of those who involve themselves most visibly in their subjects’ dilemmas and who name their own ...”

“... Gerhardie finds no place in syllabuses which find room for, say, Vonnegut or Doris Lessing. Since Henry Green, arguably the best English novelist of his time, is little better off, we need not waste our time being surprised at this neglect. It would be agreeable to believe that the present stir of interest might alter the situation: but the rather ...”

“... Edith Wharton once asked Henry James why it was that his novels so curiously lacked real life. James’s private name for her was the ‘Angel of Devastation’, and the fact that she not only perpetrated this remark but went on to record it expressionlessly in her memoirs shows just what he meant. It might be said that by then James had got used to the situation anyway, since for the previous thirty years much the same question had been asked by that large majority of the late-Victorian reading public who simply refused to read his books: after the last mild success of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James experienced half a lifetime of small and dwindling sales, which culminated, in the case of the New York Collected Edition, in total failure ...”

“... written the fiction his criticism desires. A list of the weaknesses of English fiction since, say, Henry Green would go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its ...”

“... the family’s relations and texts, soon after his death, by Leon Edel in his multi-volume life of Henry James. As a Harvard professor, Matthiessen had been, under the terms laid down by the James estate, one of the very few permitted to use the huge family archive in the Houghton Library: in effect, as a Jamesian, the only permitted person at the time other ...”

“... was the frequency with which he had to pare his nails. His shoes, left under the bed, turned green.’ The experiment of concision is not repeated.When Wyatt goes home for a visit, gothic values still rule the roost in the shadow of Mount Lamentation. He arrives more or less insane and carrying a gold figure of a bull. His father now worships ...”

“... sees in the press. The method, like Greene’s, is highly effective, but it can never produce what Henry James would have called ‘saturation’. Virginia Woolf remarked that A Handful of Dust was a brilliant novel but that she didn’t believe a word of it: a way of turning round the ordinary reader’s cliché to suggest that truth in fiction has a complex ...”

“... Franz Werfel.’ In Venice in Harry’s Bar in 1950 he meets a man whom he introduces to all as Henry Green: He asked me to lunch the next day. I was surprised to find him accompanied at lunch by an obvious piece of Limehouse trade: I’d not thought H. Green ‘so’. I started to talk about books etc, but Mr ...”

“... of succeeding her father had increased following the unexpected death of her elder brother, Henry, in autumn 1612. Her younger brother, Charles, was sickly and frail. Much of the militant Protestant fervour that Henry had attracted was transferred to Elizabeth and her family, whose fortunes became, to many English ...”

“... model a fictional character in negative space, though the effect isn’t an easy one to bring off. Henry Green, another writer with a taste for hiding in plain sight, at a distance from the material of his books but present in every syncopated phrase, manages it very effectively in Nothing (1950). The key figure in the novel is the widowed Jane ...”

“... on my part we were finally installed on seats in front of the pavilion, the soothing sight of green and white displayed before us. Although hardly an enthusiast by temperament, Frank was a cricket-lover, always reading the scores in the sports pages and watching the TV highlights. He had played regularly while a lecturer at Reading in the 1950s (‘I was ...”

“... snappily dressed, are the noble Jean de Dinteville, ambassador from King Francis I of France to Henry VIII, and his friend, perhaps alter ego, Georges de Selve, who had been given the small see of Lavaur near Toulouse to provide for a career in the royal service. Dinteville was in England from February to November 1533; de Selve, whose mission, if any, is ...”

“... are vaginas’ and ‘penises are eyes,’ not to mention the following lines: Our lovely green-clad mother spreads her legs – Corrosive, hairy, rank – and, shameless, begs For Pestilence to fuck her if he can, For War to come, and come again, again.In the evening I might turn to the overwrought adulterous rhapsodies of Marry Me (1971), in which a ...”

“... first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley is not exactly a separate world. It is a familiar one, familiar from memoirs and gossip and our general contemporary interest in the Victorian age, but ...”

“... Glyn Hughes’s novel, Where I Used to Play on the Green, won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Fiction Prize in 1982, yet it received not a tenth of the publicity awarded to winners of the Booker and the Whitbread. This is a pity, for it is a fine achievement, although too dour a story to command affection in the media ...”