“... to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and Poverty’ (the title of Henry George’s bestseller of the 1880s), New York today is more polarised economically than anywhere else in the US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to ...”

“... salad days, he sputters about her ‘shameless depravity’ and ‘atrocious perversity’. When Henry James complained of the novel’s ‘general ponderosity’, he may have had Walter partly in mind. By contrast, nothing is lost on Walter’s enemy, Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco, count of the Holy Roman Empire. The name is false, which may be why he ...”

“... from the perspective of the sons and daughters, rather than that of the migrants themselves. From Henry Roth to Philip Roth, it’s the second or third generation whose experience shapes the fiction of immigration. Brooklyn is unusual in telling the story from the immigrant’s perspective, the more so since Tóibín’s protagonist is ...”

“... and custom which inspired those young enthusiasts. We open them beside the solicitor’s clerk, Henry Crabb Robinson, who later recalled: ‘It made me feel more generously. I had never before, nor ... have I ever since felt so strongly the duty of not living to one’s self, but of having for one’s sole duty the good of the community.’ The 1793 edition ...”

“... and his eyes twinkled in the classic Frenchman’s delight in talk of les femmes. I told him about Henry James dictating his last novels to a woman named Theodora (Gift of God) Bosanquet. He said he was very fond of Henry James. I’d just been rereading The Golden Bowl, and saw it suddenly as a Derridean cat’s cradle of ...”

“... the murder is not for material gain and is believed to be for the murderer’s desire to have power over his victims. Victims may have symbolic value and are perceived to be prestigeless and in most instances are unable to defend themselves or alert others to their plight, or are perceived as powerless given their situation in time, place or status within ...”

“... of animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of sublimation was involved in both ...”

“... understanding a French notice by his hotel window in Paris: he opens the window and the facade of Henry’s Hotel collapses. Earlier in the book, we have come across some smart-ass visitors at a Greenwich Village party misunderstanding one another’s use of Greco-Latin words. ‘Philogyny? I thought you said phylogeny.’ ‘I said, misogyny recapitulates ...”

“... and Mississippi River lore, as is Walden of New England nature and Faulkner of the South; in Henry James the tendency takes the form of connoisseurship. In all these cases the implication is that reality cannot stand on its own, but requires the services of an expert to convey or unlock its meaning. The converse of this is no less true, that Americans ...”

“... aesthetics as well as with his politics? This is a question that needs extensive treatment, and Henry Hart provides some illumination in the first full-length study of Hill’s poetry. Apprehension may be aroused by the sentence from Donald Hall’s introduction quoted on the dust-jacket: ‘Geoffrey Hill’s intense Englishness leaches back into the bones ...”

“... of Strangers, or Amours de Voyage. But McEwan’s crucial jettisoning is of the name Venice. When Henry James, a hundred years ago, set himself to be yet another lauder of Venice, he launched himself immediately from his title ‘Venice’: ‘It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add ...”

“... they favour the Tate because it had been founded at the initiative of another merchant prince, Sir Henry Tate? And why were the gestures of the Duveens so rarely imitated before the new Turner Wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, opened in 1987? Spalding is remarkably candid, if often crisp, in her survey of recent developments. These include the attempt made ...”

“... seems very close. The dates, moreover, lend some slight support to my theory. In 1796, Prince Henry of Prussia, in a widely-publicised gesture, presented his own private copy of Jacques the Fatalist to the newly-founded Institut de France, and this was the signal for its first publication, and for a sudden furious revival of interest in Diderot. Potocki ...”

“... involve him with a villain called Richard Craufurd, whom Bulwer-Lytton based on the banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had been hanged for forgery before a crowd of 100,000 people at Newgate in 1824. The central male figure in Lucretia is an artist, murderer and forger called Gabriel Varney, who was reworked from elements in the life of the forger-poisoner ...”

“... which Protestant England could never hope to lay claim (although before the separation from Rome Henry VIII had made a somewhat forlorn bid to have himself elected Holy Roman Emperor). But if the British Empire could not hope to rival the prestige of Spain, it could compete on an equal footing in the Americas. As one spokesman for the Virginia Company put ...”