“... Priestley did not want to ask that question. For him, as he says in Literature and Western Man, Henry James was a writer who had no substance, no gusto, no power of living, ‘as if a ghost should write better than a man’. The more fully and robustly he lived, the better the author. Look at Hemingway. Priestley’s misapprehension came not only from ...”

“... Warrenpoint of the Forties. I went to University College Dublin once, after he had left for his Henry James Chair at New York University, and found the college echoing with the praises of the flown savant, with his sayings and with stories of his tenure. Two sorts of ex cathedra were apparent. He had made his mark, in the way that people hope for from ...”

“... approximation. It isn’t just that the words ‘an American at all’ were said by Eliot of Henry James, not of himself, but that the letter has comedy, pathos, resilience, and – because of the rueful third-person and the movement of it all (no pause after ‘and who so was never anything anywhere’) – an entire absence of self-pity. Ackroyd ...”

“... theatres, parties and country-house weekends. He begins to wonder if he has fallen into a Henry James novel, with Rosemary as the beautiful worldly corrupt European villainness. He turns out indeed to be as spellbound as Chad in The Ambassadors, for when the long-awaited peace-making letter arrives from his wife Roo, he doesn’t answer it. Yet ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about his hard-won cultural knowledge:Magnificence of classical statuary, yes. Late style of Henry James, sumptuous tactility of crêpe de chine, Sarah Vaughan singing ‘April in Paris’. What they would never understand. Mere privilege he thinks can’t touch what he has so richly acquired. Beauty, culture: yes. Can’t be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from Moretti’s taxonomy. How would his system cope with, say, Daniel Deronda or the novels of Henry James? Or, in a different register, with the novels of Tolstoy or Hardy (the latter gets only one footnoted sentence on Jude the Obscure)? In the case of Tolstoy and Hardy there is, I think, an ...”

“... d’esprit, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’, he was playing with the same idea which Henry James would explore elaborately in his story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. In both cases a narrator awaits, hopes and seeks for the arrival of the true thing, the Big Experience. And the awareness of looking is itself the indication that it will not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”