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“... on to his young half-sister. For the most part, however, she was left to her own devices. Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a ...”

“... like life, are full of evidence. It is evidence that suggests the nature of relations, and as Henry James observed ‘relations stop nowhere.’ An author, no less than a lawyer, must ‘draw the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so’. From a literary point of view, Crusoe’s find was surely not so much evidence as atmosphere. What strikes ...”

“... out of their possessions. ‘You do wisely … when in a Crowd, to amuse the Mob by Quarrels,’ Henry Fielding’s master-criminal Jonathan Wild advises his gang, ‘that while they are listening to your Jargon, you may with the greater Ease and Safety, pick their Pockets.’ In The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum, a thief-catcher, surveys with Lockit ...”

“... which is perceived or marketed as appealing to young women’ – it is not the fault of Helen Fielding’s comedy of manners. Fielding’s blundering, know-nothing heroine, ‘rudderless and boyfriendless’ at 32, has been imitated in any number of opportunistic rip-offs, in which the incidental comic details that made ...”

“... American who had likewise profited and who had then become – as Eliot would – an Englishman: Henry James. ‘The fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a ...”

“... rather than would-be artists and creators like the couturiers. In fact, however, the careers of Henry Creed or Henry Poole, who more than any others gave Savile Row its international reputation, ran in parallel with that of Worth, who originated Parisian haute couture. Tailors and couturiers alike built their ...”

“... for their charges was to offer them assisted passage out of England. Influenced by the naturalist Henry Smeathman’s arguments that Sierra Leone offered warmth, a fertile climate and a fine harbour, the Committee arranged for the blacks to be sent there. Many of its members were keen for the black settlers to have an opportunity to run their own ...”

“... art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging ...”

“... talent for the role; and she made sure of passing on her heritage – her knowledge of Richardson, Fielding, Jane Austen, Trollope and Henry James. Apart from Henry Green, Graham Greene and Adrian Bell, it seems that she hadn’t much use for contemporary authors. She was addicted to ...”

“... passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football ...”

“... MP, Tom Llewyllyn, the journalist turned don, and even the hideously disfigured homosexual, Fielding Gray. The sins of the parents may well be visited upon these children. The more faithful of Simon Raven’s readers will look back at his earlier saga to remind themselves of the previous careers of the familiar characters: but this is not strictly ...”

“... greatness and purpose, through the values elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin ...”

“... for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast ...”

“... says. It’s this kind of suggestive reticence that Eliot was reacting to when he remarked that Henry James had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. Along its outer border, the desire not to state ideas explicitly approaches the desire not to have them, as expressed by Flaubert’s ideal of a book about nothing. The obvious alternative to all this ...”

“... Patrick Bateman kills a girlfriend, apparently because she thought that his suit was designed by Henry Stuart rather than Giorgio Armani. This reduces murder to the merely satirical. A motive and an action are set up against each other in a way that says, without very much intelligence or subtlety: ‘These are the motives which this society says matter and ...”