“... of decent emotion and decent understatement, derived perhaps from Trollope’s favourite Henry Esmond (which Sutherland has edited), is not infrequent in the Companion, for there are many comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to the relief of her father’s ...”

“... knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...”

“... spit-smooth, headlong, creek-around-a-rock trough Carved by his features. He had six wives like Henry VIII but don’t laugh, Because Henry VIII couldn’t swim a stroke And if you ever want to see a true king you should watch Weissmuller In Tarzan Escapes cavorting underwater with Boy In the clear river with networks of ...”

“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself ...”

“... These qualified appreciations are thrown into perspective by the large foreground figure of Henry James, who stands for Trilling as the exemplar, in subtlety, scrupulosity and adequacy, of what an American writer can be. He is a critical landmark – an essentially American writer who can take a natural place among the great international masters ...”

“... News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed ...”

“... Emma’s expanding waistline is nowhere referred to. ‘Dramatise, dramatise!’ implored Henry James; but in dramatising the novelist, while appearing to withdraw into the wings, cannot share the biographer’s aspirations to impartiality but must commit himself to a particular view of a character. Emma’s passionate temper, for instance, is ...”

“... the struggle of their parents’ lives. Compared with what appears in the novels of Jane Austen or Henry James, Jewish family life does look a bit fraught. With the comfort and protection worked hard for by the parents, the children could entertain ideas. The irony of their disparate experiences, the new kind of conflict between the generations, was never ...”

“... to want wholeheartedly, and he becomes one of those characters so frequent in Wharton and Henry James, the man to whom nothing has happened, who has missed his whole life, as if it was an opera he was too late for. Day-Lewis brings to this part a wonderful, tired, feeble charm, creates a perfect sense of how attractive and hopeless Newland ...”

“... as they prowl about each other like a wary pair of lapsing communicators out of some late piece of Henry James – ‘haltingly, between long pauses. Behind the language that they speak other languages speak in silence, ones that they know and yet avoid, the languages of childhood and of loss. This reticence seems imperative.’ The imperative of ...”

“... than going anywhere. He always had been a Liberal, or had been a Fabian, or had been a friend of Henry James or Bernard Shaw. And he was so often nearly right, that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore.’ To this I would join a feeling, fed by his Experiment in ...”

“... collection of letters, which reveals privacies and psychologies with the discreet indirection of a Henry James novel, has – like Dr Zhivago itself – been taken up by what the late Dr Leavis used to call the colour-supplement press, in the usual mechanical interests of anti-Soviet mythology. And, of course, the martyrdom of Olga (‘People avoided me ...”

“... for more than twenty years now. The name, at once plain and elusive, might have appealed to Henry James. The echoes of ‘maiden’ and ‘evading’ are particularly apposite, for despite starting her sexual life at the age of 13, Kate remains virginal in a more important sense, never fully giving herself to anyone, always holding back from any ...”

“... meant a dismissal of America itself for having turned out badly, and in the attacks of a furious Henry James one hears the expatriate voice denounce the land of his birth and the national traits which at home are faithfully cheered. An embarrassment not only with newcomers but with America’s everyday life, which, so far from being exceptional, is ...”

“... short is that quite modestly substantial ones (by the standards of Alice Munro, let alone Henry James) come to seem monumental. Two of these longer pieces, not widely separated in the book, make claim to some sort of symmetry with their titles (‘The Cows’ and ‘The Seals’), when in fact they represent opposite extremes of Davis’s ...”