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“... a different matter. ‘Above Tooey Mountain’, for example, interweaves letters from Hopkins, James Joyce’s mother and Sir James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps ...”

“... the time. Another way to phrase the same exam question would have been: ‘Have you read Margery James?’ I’m sure I hadn’t; I have now. I was reminded of the exam question when I went to the wine cellars at Berry Brothers & Rudd on St James’s Street in early December, and as I ...”

“... instances, there is the prose of Achebe and Selvon, and the poetry of Walcott or, closer to home, James Berry (Okri might also learn a thing or two from Grace Nichols). It may be that Okri wishes, as a poet and novelist, to define himself against these older generations, but he is not yet a strong enough poet to spurn their lessons. Colin Falck’s ...”

“... Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both. ‘WMF … is the most inscrutable of men – he will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.’ Marion Mainwaring, in Mysteries of ...”

“... polemic. Just as missionaries prefer modern or idiomatic translations of the Bible over the King James version when trying to convert the heathen, Jones may have hoped that evolutionists would find his update a more effective evangelical tool than Darwin. His book, however, will be read only by the converted; it is not going to sell well in the Bible ...”

“... it is assigned firmly to the diabolic processes. The argument now doubles back to Bosch’s weird berry-on-human orgy, which is interpreted very ingeniously as an encryption of the equivocal yearnings and anxieties awakened by the discovery of the New World, all held together in a seething, volatile suspension, and informed equally by Ovid’s fruitarian ...”

“... whether it was the country itself that he missed – Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every ...”

“... of the title being a brotherhood of itinerant pipers.) The books are all of them set in the Berry, that bit of la France profonde whose centre is Bourges, and are the writing thanks to which, pace Proust, Baudelaire, Henry James (who described her work as being like ‘a large, polished, gilded Easter egg, the pride ...”

“... had to be given about Tenducci’s sexual nature, including from a servant quoted by Helen Berry in The Castrato and His Wife (2012). He was a witness as the surgeon Pietro Massi castrated Tenducci: I clearly saw that … [the surgeon] made two Incisions between the Thighs, and the Body next the Groin, and when these two Incisions were made I saw the ...”

“... known, among other things, as the teller of the most devastating of the anecdotes displaying Henry James’s incapacity to communicate efficiently. The story told in her 1933 autobiography, A Backward Glance, has James, late one evening, attempt to ask a doddering Windsor pedestrian how their car can find its way to the ...”

“... the apparent Green renaissance is a silver lining. In London, a well-executed campaign by Sian Berry – perhaps profiting from Khan’s embrace of the polluting Silvertown Tunnel – positioned the Greens as London’s third party; in Bristol they attracted substantial parts of the city’s left-wing vote and now have the same number of council seats as ...”

“... end just seems to disappear into itself. Plante has some reputation. His novel The Ghost of Henry James and his trilogy The Francoeur Family, about a household of French Canadians in America, have found plenty of admirers. In the trilogy, which Chatto have just reissued as a one-volume paperback,* he employs a deadpan, frame-by-frame manner to build up the ...”

“... she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in ...”

“... or being pursued by Lords Cholmondeley, Coleraine and others, before she settled down with Charles James Fox. Though many, perhaps most, of the women travellers were eminently respectable, being accompanied by husbands or fathers (like Horace Walpole’s darling Mary and Agnes Berry), a surprising number went on their ...”