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“... of such a life is chiefly of interest for the celebrities which it encountered. In 1966, Professor James Bertram brought out the New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold, which included all Clough’s longer ‘anti-podistic’ letters to his friend between 1847 and 1851: these had been omitted from F.L. Mulhauser’s Correspondence of A.H. Clough (1957). The ...”

“... In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with life. ‘She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more – just a little longer ...”

“... into monologue. There is an interesting moment, for instance, in All’s Well that Ends Well, when Bertram is first introduced to the King of France. Instead of receiving Bertram in the usual way, and asking after him, the King starts reminiscing about Bertram’s father, whom he obviously ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... of the heritage itself? The secessionist clergyman Benjamin Palmer, an old friend of pro-slavery James Henley Thornwell, Genovese’s favourite antebellum theologian, put the matter succinctly in 1860: ‘Must I pause to show how [slavery] has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our ...”

“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it ...”

“... rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his academic life in the study of abolitionism and the related struggles of the Civil War era, has written a narrative history that comes as close to being both comprehensive and definitive as seems possible in a single ...”

“... Bollingen edition of Coleridge’s collected works edges, with the Biographia Literaria edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, a bit past its halfway point. Nine of the projected 16 volumes are now in print. In addition, three of the projected five volumes of the private Notebooks have appeared. (They are a separate Bollingen project, though Kathleen ...”

“... Park’s moral and physical comforts acutely, and expecting all the while to hear that Edmund Bertram has engaged himself to Mary Crawford, Fanny does a Belford on her own behalf: so effectively, indeed, that Austen, unable to tolerate the suspension of narrative, immediately supplies an event. The butter is not a moment greasier when her father ...”

“... to his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow (2002-7), because the spymaster is the same in both worlds: one Bertram Tupra, a figure Nevinson both reveres and detests. It’s eerie to read two extensive first-person narratives in which the voices are meant to belong to different people – Jacques Deza in the earlier case, Nevinson in the second – but seem pretty much ...”

“... of naming: the Frasers were old London friends of Mary Crawford, there’s a Maria here whom James (Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram) goes off with, and there’s Fanny, as the Frasers call her, although she tells us at once that she does not like to be called this. What Fanny Price wins is what this Fanny ...”

“... of All’s Well That Ends Well, the ‘stage presence’ of an actual baby fathered on Helena by Bertram ‘is not ruled out’. But it is ruled out, and doubly so, by Diana’s lines, ‘Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick./ So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick,’ with their unequivocal emphasis on the unborn child stirring in ...”

“... substitute for brains, they were almost an embodiment of them. In Mansfield Park, whenever Edmund Bertram met Mr Rush-worth he used to say to himself: ‘If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.’ Of course, many of those with twelve thousand a year or more were far from stupid; but clever or foolish the landed interest ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”

“... we do a double-take. Occasionally, there is a flash of recognition. ‘It seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy ...”