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“... pioneer, Caroline is also half-French, a grande dame in the making, and a youthful protégée of Henry Adams and Henry James. She is shown having tea at Lamb House and receiving Henry Adams’s blessing on the youth of the new century; and Empire, by and large, sustains our ...”

“... been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the hour’; R.L. Stevenson had pronounced him ‘too clever to live’; and Tennyson had judged him ‘the only one ... with the divine fire’. Nine years later, news of his illness had taken precedence in London over ...”

“... cynical view of the romantic anti-capitalism of the fading swingers of the Class of ‘68. As Henry Adams wrote of himself after his brief experience as a Harvard professor in the 1870s, a teacher ‘makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. Once the pendulum has ...”

“... Sanford, and Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise. The most important historical figures are Hay, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, though there are cameo appearances from many others, including Adams’s brother Brooks, author of the imperialist manifesto Law of ...”

“... ascendancy and imperial corruption has lasted, in a line of pessimistic historicism that runs from Henry Adams to Gore Vidal. Other American borrowings from the Roman heritage look more trivial, even comical, in retrospect, like the statuary of tobacco-chewing frontier Jacksonian politicians dressed in togas. But even these reveal something about American ...”

“... He was always around the corner and out of sight,’ Henry James wrote of his older brother William as a child. ‘He was clear out before I got well in.’ The philosopher C.S. Peirce said something similar about the grown man. ‘He so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents.’ Josiah Royce, a life-long friend and Harvard colleague of William James, with whom he agreed philosophically scarcely ever, offered a fine parody of the pragmatism so closely associated with his companion’s name ...”

“... am an abject fan of the Library. I own, I find, ten of its volumes: three of Parkman, one each of Henry James, Adams, Baldwin, Frost and Stevens, the new Wilson, and an anthology of writing about baseball. The books are lovely, lovely objects. They are about the nicest books I have. American books are in general printed to ...”

“... Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist ...”

“... Harte often referred, as directly as he could or dared, to problems posed by sexual passion. When Henry Adams claimed that American writers had ‘used sex for sentiment, never for force’, he made exceptions of both Walt Whitman and Bret Harte ‘as far as the magazines would let him venture’. There are a lot of women in his stories, some quite ...”

“... at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want ...”

“... life? ‘I knew from the start that I was out for Glory,’ he wrote in that essay. ‘Unlike Henry Adams’ – the writer Vidal fondly compares his own work to – ‘I got out at 17, and vowed that if I was not elected to anything, I would not come back to live in the capital when there were so many other worlds and glories elsewhere.’ He ...”

“... into a warrior’. Of course poor Rupert had no more premonition of the war in 1913 than did Henry James, Henry Adams or anyone else. That is, he had none at all. His description of Niagara can best be understood, not as political premonition, but as literary derivation, and if Conrad ever listened to prose or ...”

“... may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial ...”

“... validating agent in the process whereby American money and European art produced (through what Henry Adams called ‘the universal solvent of money valuations’) a portable culture for a new aristocracy. It is an amusing essay, which brings the department store and the tasteful interior, the interior designer and the wife-as-shopper, into the same ...”

“... who was perhaps one of the hundred recipients of the 1906 private edition of The Education of Henry Adams, and wrote while still under the spell of that monument to historical scepticism, describes the ‘truths’ of record (journalism, documents and photographs) as treacherous and unreliable. His friend Eastman had, in the novel proper, a penchant ...”