“... 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. ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... the same story in different settings. On hearing the word ‘commitment’, she sought refuge in Henry James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of ...”

“... but that is a hazard no truly distinctive stylist avoids. Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. Jameson’s preference for a conditional over a declarative mood is a token of the necessarily speculative quality of what he does. It’s far easier to be sure that ...”

“... representatives of a new species in the American landscape, the ‘libertarian intellectual’. Henry James had foreseen the type in The Bostonians in the character of Basil Ransom, proud ex-Confederate contributor to the Rational Review, full of passionate intensity about how to harmonise hierarchy and freedom. The Buckleys’ favoured ...”

“... a number of unattractive characteristics, but allowed a spirit of self-criticism that was healthy. Henry Adams reports in his autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”

“... subsequent history of ‘bluestocking fame’ from late 18th-century commentary and portraiture to James Watson’s disparaging remarks on his collaborator, ‘Rosy’ Franklin, in The Double Helix (1968): ‘at the age of 31 her dresses showed all the imagination of English bluestocking adolescents’ When James Russell ...”

“... The abasement of life’s intrinsic qualities. That’s a story.’ ‘You’re probably right, Henry.’ ‘I feel hot about this whole issue, Frank. Sports is just a paradigm of life, right? Otherwise who’d care a goddamn thing about it?’ ‘I know people can see it that way.’ (I try to avoid that idea myself.) ‘But it’s pretty ...”

“... Brooke in profile (‘your favourite actress’, some of his friends labelled it). He was, Henry James wrote, ‘in an extraordinary degree … a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest’ (James had fallen hard for what Brooke called ‘his fresh, boyish stunt’).In 1918 his Collected Poems were ...”

“... atmosphere of those in his books but used to develop a style and practise a phrase. He looks for Henry James’s Prefaces in a bookshop, draws a blank and tries another shop over Waterloo Bridge; enjoys a salmon sandwich and a cup of coffee, and has the satisfaction of getting to the motor-coach station with ten minutes to spare. A maiden lady’s visit ...”

“... profonde whose centre is Bourges, and are the writing thanks to which, pace Proust, Baudelaire, Henry James (who described her work as being like ‘a large, polished, gilded Easter egg, the pride of a sweet shop if not the treasure of a museum’) and other townees who couldn’t be doing with her, Sand maintains to this day a pastoral niche in the ...”

“... Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this may seem to be the literary and intellectual establishment in its pomp. Reference works and ...”

“... noticeable contrast to Vaughan Williams. Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British ...”

“... But the double story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is material for an Emily Brontë or a Henry James, a great ghost story with the roles of haunter and haunted, villain and victim, hopelessly entwined. This Gothic tale, Rose demonstrates, ‘seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches it into its orbit, to make you feel that somehow ...”