“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour ...”