“... planes, the sharpest of edges, cut like a jewel. It is not exactly ‘truth to materials’ as Henry Moore would understand it, but perhaps as Eric Gill might understand it: there is truth, that is, to what stone is capable of in human hands, to its hardness, its cleanness, its neatness when worked by chisel, abrasive and buff, truth to sculpting, to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the title of Casillo’s summary chapter – a title taken from Auden’s poem ‘At the Grave of Henry James’. It is a brilliant title just because The Genealogy of Demons is committed to the project of such a judgment, but itself – being a human and not a divine text – falls short of that goal. Falling thus short, as Pound’s work fell before ...”

“... about Landor from Lyttelton; nor really about Ibsen either, though Lyttelton is prepared to like Henry James (more when older than as a young man), and wholly accepts the poetry of Hart-Davis’s personal friend, Edmund Blunden. Hart-Davis thinks Maugham ‘the most over-praised GOM since Bridges’, but, while not denying Lyttelton’s suspicion that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the famous claim that he was only saying: ‘This is so, is it not?’). ‘That is what Henry James says about the novels of Arnold Bennett, and I think you will agree. It is final,’ he told the man who painted his portrait. Yet later, it seems, he somewhat revised this judgment. Over the famous change of mind about Dickens, MacKillop is ...”

“... articulated. The problem is not that Babel Tower or A Whistling Woman ‘smells of the lamp’, as Henry James famously complained of Eliot’s historical scholarship in Romola, but that the proliferation of vocabularies and allusions – not to mention the sheer number of characters, many of them introduced in previous volumes – sometimes threatens to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... home is one of the places they are least interested in – but this needn’t be a tragedy. Henry James saw Stevenson as ‘the writer who has most cherished the idea of a certain free exposure’, adding that, ‘to his view the normal child is the child who absents himself from the family circle.’ Stevenson’s most valued version of the normal ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a ...”