“... 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 ...”

“... married man which in my case I am not, you have your house and all the rest of it, though my young lady and me will be getting married very shortly. Then she will have everything she wants too, and she’s very ready to join the Army with me, as they say sir. Because if a man’s wife is not right for the Army, then that man is not right for the Army either. I ...”

“... she played ‘no role in the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century’. Would a Lady Macbeth have been less ‘disappointing’? In contrast to Magda Goebbels and other true believers, Braun comes across as profoundly apolitical, even oblivious. She never joined the Nazi Party (but then Hitler wouldn’t let his sister join either). It ...”

“... her own house in Shanghai, and live a brisk and resolute life. Yvonne wanted to raise her to be a lady, and taught her to play the piano, to paint, to speak and write English. For young Eileen, smiling properly was especially hard. She failed every time, either laughing too loudly or not smiling at all. Yvonne also tried to teach her how to cook, how to wash ...”

“... the endless attentions to the Queen’s hair. The profession of ‘novelist’ did not exist for a lady, and Charles Burney had made his daughter abandon her potentially profitable comic drama, whose satire he thought would cause offence. So she had felt obliged to accept this post at Court, urged on by her father. Whenever the Queen’s bell rang (‘so ...”

“... care their pattern fits together.’ For an amusing American view I recall the patrician old lady from the Deep South who persisted to the end of the first quarter of the novel and then handed it back with a haughty: ‘I can only conclude that this novel was written by a congenital idiot.’ Tot homines ... However, if nobody can safely be dogmatic ...”

“... of life at the court of Charles II. It was often less than thrilling – ‘21 June, 1653. My Lady Gerrard, and one Esquire Knight, a very rich gentleman, living in Northamptonshire, visited me’; ‘23 June, 1653. Mr Lombart, a famous graver, came to see my collections’ – but was a commercial success nevertheless and reissued throughout the 19th ...”

“... in love, the woman she will later install in a White House bedroom across from her own. The First Lady’s passionate attachment to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical student leader young enough to be her son. When the President’s wife meets her young man at a Chicago hotel during his furlough from the Army, the ...”

“... Russes on Bloomsbury was enormous and lasting. Omega’s first major commission came in 1913, from Lady Hamilton, whose niece worked for Diaghilev, and who, in Judith Collins’s words, wanted to turn her own home into ‘the approximation of a stage-set for a Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As ...”

“... the same century, but if one inserts a few writers between them the journey from The Portrait of a Lady to The Portrait of the Artist doesn’t seem very long. Still, times have changed since the Modernists pulled the well-worn carpet from beneath the feet of the Victorians. Back then, it seemed that the old guard yielded to the avant only when the former had ...”

“... Tolstoy. The great pleasure of seeing Chekhov develop as a writer, from ‘The Steppe’ to ‘The Lady with the Dog’ 11 years later, is to see the way he discovers and enlarges this idea of apparently arbitrary detail. For it is not merely Chekhov’s characters who think in sudden lunges and bites of detail. It is the principle of Chekhov’s whole ...”

“... a Renaissance prince framed in a vending machine, a baby doll in a forest of twigs, a painted lady in a French hotel, marbles among the stars and ballerinas in the sky – each box a dreamed universe or fantasised cohabitation.Joseph Cornell spent most of his life at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed ...”