“... thrives on irony and play, as Milan Kundera repeatedly remarks, and T.S. Eliot meant to praise Henry James by suggesting he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. We might say the same of dozens of other novelists. Plenty of ideas, but none of them nailed down, all of them implicated in other, conflicting ideas; and there are novelists who have ...”

“... was of a piece with his distaste for over-explanation. An admirer of Jane Austen, he hated Henry James for his characters’ ‘unpleasant arid curiosity’. He might have felt the same about Dery, who is similarly prone to ‘inexhaustible questionings, probings, pryings, comparings’. ‘If anyone ever literally died of curiosity,’ Gorey ...”

“... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...”

“... My grandfather, Henry Cockburn, resigned prematurely from the Foreign Office at the age of 49, shortly before the First World War. He was the senior British diplomat in Seoul and resigned, my father told me, because he objected to British support for Japan’s occupation of Korea. It was a reckless and somewhat mysterious decision: he was about to achieve ambassadorial rank, had no private means and no other job to go to ...”

“... history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... And something about the folksy cadences of Cage’s caressing enunciation of the name Sera recalls James Stewart. Henry Coster’s 1950 movie Harvey features Stewart playing another of Hollywood’s charming, indulged drunks, Elwood, a harmless nobody with a ten-foot rabbit friend that nobody else can see. Elwood is as ...”

“... I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted (in England, at least) a slew of critical histories of his father, James VI and I, and his decadent court. Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James (1650), thanked God the Stuart family had been ruined. His assessment of ...”

“... Clarke. Elizabeth and Mary were obsessed with each other. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of Anne Boleyn be otherwise? – Mary was as legitimate as ...”

“... Although Dr Peck’s absorbing book centres on the career of an individual, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, it is not intended as a straightforward biography. As its title indicates, the author’s aim is to study, in relation to one outstanding individual, what Dr Peck sees as the crucial fields of patronage and administrative reform ...”

“... she said. “I thought maybe you were just another wop or something.”’ Twenty years earlier, James Weldon Johnson, a black man who served as American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua during the Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft administrations, opened his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) with the sentence: ‘I know that in ...”

“... and no mudguards’ – then you need this biography, which also contains the cycling secrets of ...”

“... close her mouth, or break from her. The blackmail story, which Fullerton related pathetically to Henry James as well as to Edith Wharton, his new mistress (or one of them), might, one thinks, have been all an interesting fiction to put a polite face on Fullerton’s lack of interest in committing himself elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes, following Arsène ...”

“... of Twain’s style in comparable passages. Raban weaves in phrases from other Americans as well: Henry James, Robert Lowell, further bits from T. S. Eliot. At the end of his penultimate chapter Raban prints the note he received from Boom-Boom Kelley when he and his boat detached themselves from Kelley’s tow. ‘It was the one certificate which I had ...”

“... of the impetuous, supercharged narrative manner of Virginia Woolf, or the cumulative music of Henry James. Where syntax and the overall shaping of a sentence are concerned, Clampitt can match both these supreme artists in the way she reflects the state of an enquiring or apprehending mind by means of the fits and starts of individual phrases and ...”