“... it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the ...”

“... the tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from ...”

“... Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed ...”

“... Feast, and a suit of armour decorated with scenes of Alexander’s campaigns, made for Prince Henry Frederick, the eldest son of James I. Nearly all these portrayals show Alexander in a positive light, but the story told by modern historians and even some ancient ones is more complex. Alexander came to the throne of ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... been allowed at the abbey. Samuel Pepys went to see the corpse of Catherine of Valois – wife of Henry V, disinterred during Henry VII’s rebuilding of the Lady Chapel. ‘I did kiss her mouth,’ he wrote in 1669. In 1806, having failed to ‘get’ Nelson after his death (he was buried in St Paul’s), the vergers had a ...”

“... Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587. English observers, anxious about James VI of Scotland’s reaction to his mother’s execution, were alarmed to discover that the greatest of the Scottish Catholic peers, George Gordon, Sixth Earl of Huntly, was rapidly becoming his chief confidant. In 1588 James arranged Huntly’s marriage to Henrietta Stuart, daughter of his former favourite the Duke of Lennox, thus admitting him into the wider royal family ...”

“... Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year after the ...”

“... book?’). Chris tries her best with Charlotte Stant and Maggie Verver, but chirruping about Henry James novels isn’t really what she’s all about. ‘The Dumb Cunt’ is more her style, ‘a factory of emotions’; her passion has sent her back into adolescence, ‘hunched up in a leather jacket’, listening to the Ramones. She’s creeped out ...”

“... The villagers called her a moll heron, ‘all legs and wings’. Later, having read Freud and Henry James, she hinted at a ‘restricted’ upbringing, but she found refuge in her surroundings as well as her books. Lark Rise has some excellent descriptions of the Oxfordshire countryside, interrupted from time to time by the voice of young ...”

“... the plot at last taking shape, Coetzee embarks on an intensive reading programme – Kierkegaard, Henry James, Pasternak, Flaubert, Barthes, Paz, Freud – to give the book its intellectual structure. In its early versions the magistrate’s erotic engagement with the tortured girl is quite explicit, complete with ejaculations. Later, this material is ...”

“... does not make the case that biology precludes such hopes. He is suspicious of the voice that Henry James reported hearing as he sank to the ground from the first of the three strokes that were to kill him – ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!’ – because he is so suspicious of the Jamesian notion that ‘art makes life, makes ...”

“... New York edition of The Ambassadors, the first great novel to be written in the modern century, Henry James wrote that ‘for development, for expression of its maximum, my glimmering story was, at the earliest stage, to have nipped the thread of connection with the possibilities of the actual reported speaker. He remains but the happiest of ...”

“... analyse, within a four-lecture compass, Beckett, L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, Pasolini’s Sade, Henry James and Assyrian art, plus late Freud, while developing a new account of sexuality, fails. Too much is in shorthand; juxtaposition masquerades as argument; the promised ‘aesthetics of masochism’ never quite emerge. Admirers of Bersani’s early ...”

“... much of the hussy in Margaret Oliphant, who was shy, sharp-witted and buck-toothed; according to Henry James, her physiognomy was ‘that of a person whose eggs are not all in one basket’. The daughter of a Midlothian clerk, she published her first novel when she was 21, and married her cousin – a designer of stained glass – three years later; by ...”