“... it was just something that Europe happened to muddle into. Allied intellectuals agreed with Henry James, for whom the war was a ‘bleak and hideous tragedy’ that would ‘undo everything’: German ones were more likely to welcome it, whether as a long-desired reunion of ‘might and mind’ (Thomas Mann) or quite simply, as for Rilke, ‘a god ...”

“... and it haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... Yankee cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money ...”

“... of the woman he loved. Her ideas of their relationship counted for nothing against his will. Both Henry James and Choderlos de Laclos would have deeply admired the skill with which Lawrence exploited his apparent powerlessness in the face of three amoral but powerful and realistic women – Frau von Richthofen and her two daughters – scheming to give ...”

“... shares certain affinities, is Iris Murdoch (the other novelist who comes to mind in reading her is Henry James). She is interested, that is to say, in the mixing but not the muddling of traditions, and in psychoanalysis as inescapably a moral enterprise – ‘tending as it does towards greater freedom in the making of moral choices’ – that has to ...”

“... Florine Stettheimer​ was a rich New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by squirrels and ferrets and showing a lot of leg ...”

“... club of Bellow, Mailer, Updike and Roth. Like Grace Paley’s short fictions, or the novels of Henry James, Fox’s novels don’t confine themselves to the smaller disturbances of man. What they do instead is find a scale, a language, in which the small disturbances can register – and the larger upheavals be illuminated. Free of ...”

“... but this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a ...”

“... his overall production as a canon unto itself. No other American writers except Gertrude Stein and Henry James have managed this successfully, and I suspect it’s a further source of irritation to those who find Burroughs irritating anyway. He was a rare example – Faulkner was another – of a writer who can write while intoxicated and he wrote nearly ...”

“... of Rye, the cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint ...”

“... love between Filippo Lippi and a nun in Renaissance Florence, and the third the lurid career of Henry James Prince, a Victorian priest who founded a sect called the Agapemonites and retreated to a country house in Somerset (dubbed ‘the Abode of Love’), where he surrounded himself with beautiful women – a fantasy Gray quite reasonably finds ...”

“... for the biblical corpus were quite far from being early Iron Age equivalents of Flaubert or Henry James. But the book also suffers from the defects of its abundant virtues in assigning virtually everything to scribes and their disciples and the schools within which they operated. If some biblical texts are indeed patchwork or anthological ...”

“... of the more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ‘most people who are worth knowing in Europe’. As she sat at her table, her ‘cream-coloured miracle of a dress’ was reflected in all the ...”

“... act on it. Perhaps the uncanniest spectre is the one that self-haunts. In ‘The Jolly Corner’ Henry James has his protagonist, Spencer Brydon, return after a long absence from his American home, only to confront his unlived self: ‘He’s none of me, even as I might have been.’ My favourite in this neo-Gothic genre is ‘The Smell’ by Patrick ...”

“... much the same scale and brimming with booty from Versailles and the Doges’ Palace. According to Henry James, Hannah was ‘large, coarse, Hebrew-looking, with hair of no particular colour and personally unattractive’ (ah, the exquisite sensibility of the novelist), but he had to concede that she was good-natured, sensible and kind, and the 12 years ...”