“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed return to history in Renaissance/early modern studies over the last fifteen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life. For the first century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative – Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev. J.E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) and W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913). These pioneers had two main messages to ...”

“... the best plan is to pipe down. 25 August. Second day shooting a documentary on Westminster Abbey. Henry VII’s Chapel, which the Abbey prefers (and the pious Henry VII would, I’m sure, have preferred) to call the Lady Chapel, is to be closed at the end of the week for cleaning and repairs so we have two days to film all ...”

“... the theological spadework that enabled the Tudors to break the old Christian prohibition on usury. Henry VIII legalised it; Edward VI recriminalised it; since Elizabeth I restored her father’s financial initiative in 1571 – albeit with a cap of 10 per cent – lending and borrowing money at interest has stealthily metamorphosed from rarity to ...”

“... in a novel which came out in 1903, the very year before ‘Mrs Bathurst’ was published, when Henry James allows his Strether drily to envisage his own loss of hope in life – and The Ambassadors is another love-story – as a train’s ‘faint, receding whistle miles and miles down the line’. Such a literary context suggests a bearing for the ...”