“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... labelled ‘autofiction’ – was of little use to Barker. Recalling her first encounter with Henry James, she said that although she couldn’t ‘understand everything’, she felt she was being taken on ‘a profound emotional journey that went beyond mere comprehension’. Not that she’s entirely averse to comprehension. The position espoused ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”