“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In a world as shabby as this, goodness doesn’t get you anywhere, which is why, as Henry James knew, it is as gloriously pointless as the aesthetic. In the end, one has to be virtuous just for the hell of it. The demonic are those who sense some frightful non-being at the root of their identity, and who find this sublime chaos embodied in ...”

“... and a puzzle, since it should appeal to an English-speaking public addicted to Jane Austen and Henry James, with both of whom Fontane has many broad similarities. At 17, Effi is married off to the civil servant Baron Geert von Innstetten, whom her mother once loved but rejected in order to marry Effi’s father, a man of higher rank. Effi is pleased ...”

“... bathetically, Oliver is an insufferable smartarse because he’s horribly insecure. Barnes isn’t Henry James: the reader is usually pointed pretty firmly in the right direction, and sometimes this seems mechanical. But at his best, as in several stories in The Lemon Table, he’s very good at understated implication. Straightforward narrative, however ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... of it or not, all four of them also betray confusion, flux and anxiety. The dust-jacket blurb of James Lees-Milne’s People and Places suggests this right away. His book, it tells us, is an ‘extraordinary, amusing and touching picture ... of an England now lost’. The story will be a familiar one to those who have read his published diaries. In ...”

“... see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave the world rather than to understand or change it, renouncing (inter alia) religion, property, profit or prostitutes, tobacco, alcohol or flesh (sometimes ...”

“... he was alive. ‘I think he has had – will have had – the most exquisite literary fortune,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse when Pater died in 1894, ‘i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius) & absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face.’ For ...”

“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s ...”

“... found everywhere in American writing, from Cooper to Emerson, from Twain to Whitman, and Henry James, from Dreiser to Willa Cather and on to Mailer. Lawrence’s two Englishwomen, Lou Witt and her acerbic mother, are to be found at the end of the story in the deserts of New Mexico, where the younger woman, like the New England woman who occupied ...”