“... of a fashion among American writers, usually when resident in or recently returned from Europe. Henry James’s long list of negatives applied to Hawthorne’s America (‘no sovereign, no court ... no church, no clergy ... no palaces, no castles ... no Epsom nor Ascot’) is only the most famous instance of the trope. But competing with this theory of ...”

“... I knew he liked me being funny and smart and I played up to that, enjoying the attention and a power I was quite unable to define. I was alert and uneasy about the way he looked at me, although I couldn’t identify it until the day he crossed the room on his knees – I’d moved to another chair when I thought he was sitting too close – and begged me ...”

“... he weighed 11 st. He was heaviest in 1809 (11 st 5 lbs), lightest two years later (9 st 11 lb). Henry Angelo was a fencing master and the author of a memoir about his friends and his father, Domenico, a Tuscan swordfighting legend who had moved to London and started a fencing and equestrian school in Soho. Fencing matches were yet another way to ...”

“... of the privacy of disappearance; as if privacy, moving relentlessly away, by the very sustaining power of its withdrawal kept the body eternally moving downward, but in one place, and perpetually before the eye. Such a singular was Nora. There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own descent. I had hoped the Selected Works ...”

“... the Americans were unaccustomed to greatness, and their leaders did not know how to exercise their power, or so the British thought. As Harold Macmillan put it, after observing the Americans at the Casablanca conference, ‘these Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.’ The result ...”

“... such matters or even to have come to disapprove of them, but in his notebooks for 12 January 1895, Henry James writes: Note here the ghost story told me at Addington ... by the Archbishop of Canterbury ... the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house ... The servants, wicked and ...”

“... was more than outweighed by highly respectable contributions from the likes of Edmund Gosse, Henry James and even John Buchan. Yet many of the illustrations did shock and even revolt, and Lane was to sack Beardsley when the backwash from the Wilde scandal hit the Bodley Head. ‘Wilde!’ wrote Lambert, in one of his few stylistic lapses. ‘The very ...”

“... The result was what Ezra Pound called ‘Kipling’s “Bigod, I-know-all-about-this” manner.’ Henry James became acquainted with the first Lanchester when it broke down outside his house in Rye, in October 1902. The same vehicle conveyed him, a year later, on a return visit to the Kipling establishment at Bateman’s, in Sussex. During this period James ...”

“... those of the new French heroes Mirabeau and Dumouriez. He had met his fellow Irish republicans, Henry Sheares and Wolfe Tone, and gained Girondin support for a French expeditionary force to land in Ireland. A more attractive personality than Shelley, he had the same high-born energy and idealism. And he had them a generation earlier, when history seemed at ...”

“... tentatively around an absence, and in doing so, begins to give the absence shape. In August 1914, Henry James wrote to a friend, the novelist Rhoda Broughton: ‘The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara – yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the ...”

“... Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time “wanted”, after the manner of its ...”

“... Red Monkey. A few years later, after she’d seen the work of the so-called outsider artist Henry Darger, she riffed on his schoolgirl characters, the ‘Vivian girls’, in frantically populated acrylics. As Willing’s health deteriorated, she acquired focus: the cartoon figures crystallised into a series of paintings of an oversized young girl ...”

“... Tudor and Stuart nobles sneered at the self-made man, but also feared him, as the wealth and power that had belonged uniquely to gentle blood came within his grasp. In America and the Caribbean, however, the subordinating power of race surpassed that of class or gender. Servants and apprentices were ...”

“... and emancipated sexual code, it was not principles that counted here but power, just as it would be when the nations went to war two years later. Lawrence as England won this power struggle, refusing to forgo: showing indeed an utter ruthlessness worthy of the German General Staff, or later Hitler ...”

“... shares certain affinities, is Iris Murdoch (the other novelist who comes to mind in reading her is Henry James). She is interested, that is to say, in the mixing but not the muddling of traditions, and in psychoanalysis as inescapably a moral enterprise – ‘tending as it does towards greater freedom in the making of moral choices’ – that has to work ...”