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“... Edith Wharton once asked Henry James why it was that his novels so curiously lacked real life. James’s private name for her was the ‘Angel of Devastation’, and the fact that she not only perpetrated this remark but went on to record it expressionlessly in her memoirs shows just what he meant ...”

“... somewhat higher, and they might hobnob with the great in salons and house parties, where, as Henry James sometimes suggests, they were cultivated for their celebrity or their charm rather than for their books – see, for example, ‘The Death of the Lion’. Society was open to the talents, but to have the right background could only help, and MacCarthy’s ...”

“... My art​ is formalist,’ Frank Bowling wrote in 1988, ‘and my experience is that of a black artist.’ What might appear an opposition between formalist concerns and lived experience has proved, for Bowling, a powerful dualism. His current retrospective at Tate Britain (until 26 August) is his first at a British gallery ...”

“... to be one kind of storyteller, and turns out to be quite another; casual sexual partners Tommy and Frank, friends who meet for dreamy, almost absent-minded chemsex; employer and employee, Ronnie the plumber and his mate Pigeon, whom Ronnie accidentally leaves behind at the end of a workday and who hides for days in the attic of a client’s house.We have ...”

“... Fitzgerald’s Cambridge novel, The Gate of Angels, contains a character closely resembling M.R. James, and ‘The Axe’ is a skilfully composed horror story he would have enjoyed. But it is far from derivative, with much more going on in it than one would at first suppose. Its peculiar virtue is that the narrative is not merely the path to a horrible ...”

“... Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development of his story, which described modern divorce and adultery from the point of view of a young girl ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career ...”

“... of these stories is a little astounding, even by Updike’s standards. In ‘Natural Colour’, Frank, stuck in his flavourless marriage (‘he had opted for a wife, and a wife she was, no less or more’), recalls an old flame, Maggie, and an earlier life of real and desired adulteries: ‘Driving back from taking the babysitter home, ...”

“... these books might have travelled far less well. The most recent addition to the series, Heather James’s Shakespeare’s Troy, is reasonably typical of the rest, so far as I have seen them. Her main argument concerns the theme of the translation of empire (translatio imperii) and its accompanying translatio studii. This idea, which flourished in medieval ...”

“... years that followed I got to know him well. Another influence of that time was the fiction writer Frank Sargeson, who distrusted the university and warned me against an academic career. By 1955 I was married and living on Auckland’s North Shore close to the Sargeson house, at the back of which Janet Frame, recently released from years of incarceration in ...”

“... as cultural artefacts, we shall recognise that everything is, in the end, inescapably political. Frank Lentricchia, in his Afterword, undertakes to demonstrate that Wallace Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of a Jar’, probably chosen for its apparent remoteness from politics, ‘sharpens our awareness of the structure of power’; and in principle there is no poem ...”

“... Of the seven volumes of diaries published over the years by James Lees-Milne two have now been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ‘Kubla Khan ...”

“... this necessary person, regretting but never forgetting that he needed to be pleased. When Henry James sent him a copy of The Spoils of Poynton he told Garnett he imagined ‘with pain the man in the street trying to read it’; ‘the delicacy and tenuity of the thing are amazing,’ but how could it hope to sell? Jessie pretended to admire it, but he was ...”

“... works of Jefferson in one volume, one of four Henry Adams volumes, and one of four Emersons. James will fill eight volumes, and the first, soon to appear, includes Watch and Ward and four other early works. His critical writing will occupy two volumes, which will be not the least of the benefits offered by this series. All titles are to be kept in ...”

“... in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, George Cukor’s in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, Frank Pierson’s in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and Cooper’s now with himself and Lady Gaga, alias Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – are remarkably faithful to their initial premise ...”