“... and similar impossibles’, but then he was writing to Aunt Laura, who was reading Portrait of a Lady and may have indicated that the going was getting rough. In Aspects of the Novel (1927) Forster gave several pages to The Ambassadors, and showed that he thought it quite possible but stingy – an instance of James’s premise, according to Forster’s ...”

“... tenderly, or drily. Julia watches a bloody duel fought over her, with the courteous interest of a lady at a medieval tournament, from what appears, surreally, to be the window of a public bathhouse. This puzzling scene provides a turning-point to the drama, for it is followed by the one drawing of a tête-à-tête between the lovers – a misnomer, since her ...”

“... a Jewish husband, ‘hates’ Israel.And of course Trump had to bring up the cats. Vance’s cat lady crack wasn’t going away, so the Republicans had demonstrated their cat-loving credentials by creating the completely false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing cats off the front porches of real Americans and eating them. This ...”

“... Nancy said to me after the show as we waited for an armed guard to escort us to her car. ‘Lady, you have balls!’ In New York the next morning, I ended the tour with an appearance on Crossfire, a public-affairs programme on which two antagonists duke it out, each with her very own hostile interviewer; as a friend remarked, it’s like being locked in ...”

“... we are told, relished the company of sophisticated old ladies and he had an unbounded esteem for Lady Tennyson, as well as ‘adoring’ her children. He made a point of cultivating his friends’ wives. It is possible he remained a bachelor because of his epileptic attacks (which he covered up well), or even because of the maladie d’ amour he picked up as ...”

“... objects – a guinea for the King and a Jew’s harp for the bishop – while beside them a lady and gentleman, or rather a teapot and a periwig, engage in a tête à tête. This, Uglow points out, is still the language of the emblem book, where images stand, hieratically, for ideas. By 1762, in Five Orders of Periwigs, the process is reversed, objects ...”

“... As Brophy does not point out, such sentiments are reserved, in novels, to wicked women, such as Lady Bellaston and Roxana. One of the drawbacks of Brophy’s collection of evidence is that she is sticking entirely to the middle class. Yet within the range of the middle class, too, she prefers the upper or genteel end, and we get relatively few glimpses of ...”

“... and the salaries of the executives concerned.This was written a few hours before I learned of Lady Thatcher’s death and it’s an appropriate epitaph. 17 April. Shots of the cabinet and the ex-cabinet at Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s just emphasise how consistently cowardly most of them were, the only time ...”

“... to be his selection, more than once, as host of a swan dinner for the Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady. Useful basic networking. Father and grandfather had been Brothers before him. Painting was the family business: eleven men called Bosch, through five generations, are titled ‘painters’ in the archive. We have a single surviving contract for a major ...”

“... process grew no more transparent as he aged: ‘The story came as it did, by itself,’ he said of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ‘so I left it alone.’ He loathed novelists like Flaubert, whom he conceived to be control freaks, and whose books were ‘carefully plotted and arranged developments’, quite lacking the crucial quality he called ...”

“... and though the last thing he wants is any sort of hold-up (‘“God damn you, lady,” my grandfather said’), he can’t ignore her, stand-up guy that he is. A number of pets have gone missing, as it turns out, and a predator is suspected. In Florida an alligator is an obvious possibility, but Devaughn, the village’s night ...”

“... both with women – Minny Temple, who inspired the heroines of Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, and the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose tangled intimacy with James provoked some of his most celebrated short stories. Like his sister Alice, Tóibín says, James ‘recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love’. But while ...”

“... on endlessly about their childhoods, and then goes on about her own. She reads The Portrait of a Lady and wonders about the difference between biography and autobiography, and why novels have to be about other people’s lives, not the writer’s own. (‘Isabel, who had had the experiences, hadn’t written a book; Henry James, who had written the ...”

“... in Britain: taciturn becapped old workers line up alongside bright young students. A middle-aged lady looks me directly in the eye and says: ‘We are a poor country but we love books.’ It is a straightforward statement, and not in the least mawkish. It is also true. At a meeting with editors from two of Bulgaria’s literary journals, I am unable to tell ...”

“... unfolds. When it is over, Cleopatra whispers in Charmian’s ear and Iras says: ‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’ Cleopatra answers: ‘It is provided’, referring without question to the means of death. Given the drumbeat consistency of the references to the death-plan in counterpoint with the studied formality of ...”