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“... close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​ , who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...”

“... of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will ...”

“... genius. In fact Draper’s slogan was first used by Lucky Strike not in 1960 but in 1917. Claude Hopkins based a famous set of ads for Schlitz beer on a visit to the brewery, where he discovered that they washed and sanitised their bottles with steam. ‘His hosts assured him that every brewery did the same,’ as Martin Mayer recounts it in Madison ...”

“... to blame, because with his genius of mind there went an untameable insolence of behaviour. Henry James met the 36-year-old Peirce in Paris in 1875, and reported to his brother William back in Boston that ‘he is a very good fellow & one must appreciate his mental ability, but he has too little social talent ... too little art of making himself ...”

“... Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in 1879, fifty ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... failure are the subject of a recent study, Not One Inch, by M.E. Sarotte, a historian at Johns Hopkins and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.* The title refers to the assurance on the limits of Nato expansion given to Mikhail Gorbachev by James Baker, then US secretary of state, in 1990. The Soviet Union had ...”

“... the barley takes on an additional poignancy from the cacophony before it (by Dylan Thomas out of Hopkins) and chiming silliness after it, like Auden’s pastiche of Hopkins in The Orators. To say this is to register a failure of Nicholson’s regionality and shrewd ingenuousness, for nothing could be more remote from these ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... wholes; it was, one critic said, as if he were developing a photographic negative. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought that Whistler excelled in his feeling for ‘what I call inscape (the very soul of art)’, and one imagines him as keeping a given ‘inscape’ inviolable and intact over months or years. The upshot seems to be that this notorious swaggerer ...”

“... is the artist’s conscience, the duty to make sense of it all, the pressure of form as Henry James apprehended it: ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ In ‘Primer Class’, Elizabeth ...”

“... the Bodleian on the north side, on the east the Codrington, part of Hawksmoor’s All Souls, and James Gibbs’s Camera in the middle. There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see ...”

“... yet misleading. Lavishly illustrated, sometimes with pictures that aren’t actually discussed (by Hopkins, Poe and Oscar Wilde), apparently effortless, occasional, these pieces are freighted with the chronic preoccupations evident since the beginning of this intelligent writer’s long career. They are not the innocent reports they seem to be. Witness ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the standard ...”