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“... 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 ...”

“... often imagined as a house (‘The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,’ Henry James wrote in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady), which makes the characters who occupy it tenants of a sort. Tenants can be unruly, do damage to the fixtures, take over the place. You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... play. Simone Weil got the boot, as did Nina Simone and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’ In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned ...”

“... In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex from his campaign in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ – a light touch from which some heavy inferences have been drawn ...”