“... her connections, which ranged from Rodin to Mrs Humphry Ward, put the eminent on their mettle. Henry James thought her school at ‘high, breezy Wimbledon’ held ‘a very particular place ... The one shade of objection is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in ...”

“... all. And there would be those who would resist invasion: Bob Dylan (now clearly revealed as the Henry James of our age) not least. But the scene was set. The place: the Factory, Warhol’s studio, on East 47th Street. The fuel: hard drugs, especially amphetamines. The project: to condense the history of metropolitan interiors into a slow home ...”

“... he was hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most ...”

“... permutations in Four in America (‘imagine George Washington as a great novelist; imagine Henry James as a great general’): Tschumi as traditionalist, or Ando as avant-garde. Each slot is, in other words, a space of thematic interrogation and the ‘infinite task’ proposed by the book is to continue for oneself the process it initiates. Of ...”

“... having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was ...”

“... Port Ticonderoga. The Chase family wealth was based on buttons. (There is a hidden gibe here at Henry James, who in The Ambassadors would not let Strether tell us what was the embarrassing household article on which the Newsomes of Woolett had raised their fortune: ‘a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use ...”

“... Human Abstract’. The Vassar archives hold references to many other writers and critics – Henry James, Hart Crane, as well as notes on modern art and scattered thoughts on narrative – that don’t make it into Quinn’s edition, and it would have been good to know more about her selection criteria. Small quarrels aside, Quinn’s notes ...”

“... heavy and gilded, with something of the hippo-and-the-pea effect H.G. Wells observed in the later Henry James: what exactly was it all those words were struggling to capture? Was that hippo wearing a tutu for the hell of it or was it undergoing an emergency of self-definition? Three novels in and Cusk had two babies in quick succession. A Life’s Work ...”

“... have become unaccustomed to them, new and surprising burdens. Students complain when asked to read Henry James or Proust, with their long, carefully constructed and nuanced sentences; the essential nature of sports like cricket and baseball are modified to accommodate the demands of television; classic golf courses are redesigned to make them faster to ...”

“... of American life, while she appears to be on temporary day-release from a DC think tank. Henry James famously said that to be an American is a complex fate. Few living Americans have as fully embodied that complexity in their own lives as Obama has done, and none has written about it with such intelligent regard for its difficulties and ...”

“... other things they are reminding us that this work is not only romantic, it is a form of romance. Henry James says romance as a genre deals with ‘experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it’. The implication is that the writer of such works does the disengaging, disembroiling and ...”

“... to the Swedish state, to be ‘administered by the Swedish Institute in Rome’. The house, which Henry James described as ‘a creation of the most fantastic beauty, poetry and inutility I have ever seen clustered together’, is now a museum, nature reserve and writers’ retreat. The book it lends its name to is harder to categorise. As a young ...”

“... had left out the growth of English Protestantism. Dr Dowling’s study of Humanism in the reign of Henry VIII is, among much else, a good chance to check the significance of this omission. I cannot find in her book any definition which enables me to recognise a Humanist when I meet him or her, but since Dr Dowling will undoubtedly tell me I suffer from ...”

“... their newsletter predicted that ‘those who enjoy writers like Joseph Conrad, Anatole France, Henry James . . . will exult in it . . . Those readers, on the other hand, who prefer the straightforward narrative – as exemplified by such novelists as Galsworthy, Tarkington, Bennett and innumerable others . . . may even find The Hotel annoying by ...”

“... have given up meat long ago. Along with all this he was seriously studying socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ...”