“... with verve and elegance. Perhaps, she thinks, it is all the fault of the old maestro Henry James. As a critic, and even more as a practitioner, he got the public used to the doctrine of the novel as fine art, ‘a creation beyond paraphrase or reduction’. In James’s novels, the characters are typically made to ...”

“... A famous passage in Henry James’s Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne laments the absence for the writer in America of every relation and institution which made writing socially viable – an army and a navy and a church and a court, and classes and village squires and evening parties. James’s view of the materials available to the writer may strike us today as somewhat old-fashioned and unenterprising, but there is a basic shrewdness in what he says ...”

“... going anywhere. He always had been a Liberal, or had been a Fabian, or had been a friend of Henry James or Bernard Shaw. And he was so often nearly right, that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore.’ To this I would join a feeling, fed by his Experiment in ...”

“... by an interviewer from the Paris Review about his early influences, Rush first mentioned ‘D.H. Lawrence. Actually, a lot of Lawrence.’ He has probably been familiar for decades with the argument Lawrence made in the characteristically irresponsible and penetrating Studies in Classic ...”

“... his power to do so felt – and he remains always bored. There is a remarkable coincidence with Lawrence when George Eliot refers to Grandcourt as a ‘handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind’. I am thinking of the passage in The Crown (V) where Lawrence takes the snake and the ...”

“... making a proper spectacle of himself. His peers had difficulty in fathoming this phenomenon. T.E. Lawrence thought Coward had ‘a hasty kind of genius’. Sean O’Casey spat spiders at the mention of his name: ‘Coward hasn’t yet even shaken a baby-rattle of life in the face of one watching audience.’ J.B. Priestley, as late as 1964, taxed him ...”

“... good translations, and perhaps also because the generation he influenced – Gide, Kafka, Musil, Lawrence, Bely – superseded him by smoothly manufacturing his inventions as if they were not inventions. Yet his Fascism must partly explain his contemporary eclipse. It drained, and almost abolished, his name while he was still alive. One can trace the ...”

“... When Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, the embarrassed author remarked that at least some of the audience was clapping. These approvers were powerless to out-clamour the ‘hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs’, whose roars were ‘like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo’, but for James they represented ‘the forces of civilisation ...”

“... species (Herakles and Iphikles, the immortal and mortal infant twins born of Zeus and Amphitryon). Lawrence Wright grounds what he calls ‘this widespread fantasy’ in other peoples’ studies of separated identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common ...”

“... the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and James, Proust and Joyce are adepts who immolate themselves on the altar of their own art, gathering profane experience into the artifice of eternity. For Leavis, the most precious novel is one which reflects a ‘reverent openness before Life’, and the ...”

“... after his death, like Webern’s late cantatas or Bach’s Art of Fugue. Curiously, although T.E. Lawrence had found Homer ‘bookish’ and ‘house-bred’, this line of thinking was never explored, but the question of orality began to focus more on performance and narrative technique than on the difficulties of composition. One of the most tantalising ...”

“... as the inevitable progress of the law’s internal logic, or from historians of the family like Lawrence Stone, who identify it with the triumph of the Affective Individual. Married Women’s Separate Property begins with the Restoration and concludes with the passage of the Dower Act of 1833: a minor piece of legislation, as Staves acknowledges, that ...”

“... modern practitioners as L.P. Hartley and Walter de la Mare, to the definitive achievements of M.R. James, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and their Gothic predecessors. The ghost story, or original tale of the supernatural, was essentially a short story, delicately crafted to obtain the maximum effect from its metaphysical equivocations. If it did not aspire to the ...”

“... makes everything healthy by making everything run’. T.S. Eliot thought highly of him and D.H. Lawrence found in him ‘a gentleman’, ‘a pure mind’ less degrading than Dostoevsky’s. Nor have academics lagged in appreciating his virtues. There have been many studies of the Satyricon in the 20th century. Most of them end up celebrating an ...”

“... Zawahiri and his group immediately. It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian ...”