“... who had all the confidence of the class without giving a damn about belonging to it. Oddly enough, Henry James was in the same position because, as Ralph Touchett says, ‘being an American here, you don’t belong to any class.’ The Portrait of a Lady is not about a lady in the English sense, but about a specimen of a particular sort of American ...”

“... way everyone would if they had a writer lurking in their consciousness, just as characters in late Henry James speak not as their real-life equivalents might but as they themselves have to if they are to stretch their own emotional and intellectual possibilities as far as they will go. In James the money and the social ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... full force of these unpromising circumstances. They were both children of the dynasty’s founder, Henry VII: Margaret, the subject of Linda Porter’s biography, born in 1489, and her sister Mary, seven years younger. Two later Tudor daughters escaped such a fate by becoming mistresses of their own fortunes through genealogical accident. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or Romantic than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”