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“... legend; she pleased herself, and others came round. When she wrote in a final exam for William James, ‘I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today,’ James understood, and gave her the highest grade in the class. She eventually graduated from Radcliffe magna cum ...”

“... to Lord Byron’) that You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effect of ‘brass’, Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety The economic basis of society. A Suitable Boy is, like the novels of ...”

“... There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer. Four of the characters receive omens, and Joyce would regard these as an assurance that some great event would occur. Stephen on the previous night had a disturbing dream ...”

“... of authors people dream of reading, easily outclassing those former champions Tolstoy and Joyce. I also suspect that chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative ...”

“... at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young wife, Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... He will open a review, as if telling the boys, ‘Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903,’ ‘Alice James, born 1848, was the only sister of Henry James.’ And these decent and helpful conventions (now hopelessly out of date – a startling number of the intelligent young now know no history at all) will sometimes ...”

“... of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish ...”

“... them recalls, in its total transcendence of shame, the erotic correspondence in 1909 between James and Nora Joyce. Joyce, as Richard Ellmann puts it, ‘wishes to possess his wife’s soul, and have her possess him, in utter nakedness. To know someone else beyond love and ...”

“... all the confidence of the class without giving a damn about belonging to it. Oddly enough, Henry James was in the same position because, as Ralph Touchett says, ‘being an American here, you don’t belong to any class.’ The Portrait of a Lady is not about a lady in the English sense, but about a specimen of a particular sort of American girlhood, done as ...”

“... The early story ‘You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you’ is closely modelled on Joyce’s ‘Araby’: in both, the early romantic impulse is disappointed by the tawdry reality of the bazaar and carnival. Joyce ends: ‘Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by ...”

“... like to have their own tanks or bazookas. Many would prefer a virtually complete ban on guns. Joyce Malcolm’s book reopens the question of the right to bear arms by pointing out that it was in origin English, and that the English had an unfettered right to arm themselves until 1920 (and, one should add, there was no statutory control over shotguns until ...”

“... to the system itself. He argues, in line with other Marxist historians working in this field, like James Hinton and Gareth Stedman Jones, that revolutionary class-consciousness can grow out of a struggle for control of production itself. The Leninist model is thus discarded as a schematic imposition of ahistorical categories upon diverse and dynamic historical ...”

“... the list of people who’ve given it a go: her New York maid (Lena Pepitone), two of her husbands (James Dougherty, Arthur Miller), her half-sister (Berniece Miracle), her stalkers (Robert Slatzer, James Haspiel), her saviours (Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett), her driver of one summer (Colin Clark), her coroner (Thomas ...”

“... of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from the ...”