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“... who had likewise profited and who had then become – as Eliot would – an Englishman: Henry James. ‘The fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a ...”

“... of mental illness or drug use. The first psilocybin trial, led by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, recruited its subjects via small ads in the local Baltimore and Washington press under the heading ‘Interested in the Spiritual Life?’ This is a very different cohort from mental health service user groups and ...”

“... First Letter to the Corinthians, the passage about love, with Father Jolliffe opting for the King James version using charity. He took time at the start of the reading to explain to the congregation that charity was love and not anything to do with flag days or people in doorways. Or if it was to do with people in doorways that was only one of its ...”

“... was all. This phase of Miller’s career was astonishingly productive. For him as for Henry James, Europe made literature discutable. Always fluent, Miller now erupted with articles, books, essays and reviews – almost always prefaced with genuflection to the European sages who had inspired him. Miller has retained two features in his work that are ...”

“... want to finish his lines in this cracked glaze. This is the poet, at his best a true heir of Hopkins, once capable of lustre – ‘Where fish at dawn ignite the powdery lake’ (‘To the (Supposed) Patron’) – and immediacy: ‘The lamps grew plump with oily reliable light’. His beautiful poem, ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Galsworthy and Dickens, and those literary men who grew up in City families – Ruskin, Morris, Hopkins – and fled in horror. And this shows good judgment for, in the end, we don’t really give a toss about the Moscow-St Petersburg Railway, that the loan was at 4½ and 93, was oversubscribed 25 times and that Barings made £105,000 out of it; only that ...”

“... of lectures with the general title ‘Philosophy in History’ which were delivered at Johns Hopkins University during 1982-3, aided by a subvention from the enlightened Exxon Education Foundation. All the papers are of interest, some of major interest; the prospective reader should, however, be warned that this is not a book but a series of ...”

“... some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but ...”

“... When Margaret Drabble says that, like Trollope, ‘Henry James admires the inimitable, unpurchasable gleam of time’, and describes his Poynton as ‘a Mentmore in miniature’, or when she writes of ‘the allegorical significance and sexual innuendo of the medieval garden’, or remarks that architectural irregularity, to English eyes, ‘seems to be a key, a touchstone, a mystic pledge of some indefinable authenticity’, or calls Dickens ‘the great poet of pollution’, or reminds us that, in Wordsworth’s time, ‘the love of nature seemed almost to replace the love of mankind,’ or says a thousand other such things as she wanders through the settings of our stories and poetry, it becomes obvious that we are in for a new look at this celebrated scenery ...”

“... and ‘atmosphere’ statements to back up dialogue and action, the player creates what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. A rich and diverse narrative (a ‘matrix’, as they like to think of it) is assembled. For many players the ‘role’ (especially in Social MOOs) represents the most exciting element of the game. A survey in the ...”

“... along with Ruskin’s ‘Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. But what about Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the greatest weather poets of all time (does anyone else do hail?). He finds no place in the book although his ‘skies of couple-colour’, the rush of ‘descending blue’ on an early summer’s day, ‘lovely behaviour/Of silk-sack ...”

“... his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that many students find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I ...”

“... one depicting a man, the other a child. The man is an affable-looking chap, reminiscent of Phil Hopkins, a percussionist at the repro Globe on Bankside. The head-and-shoulders format allows us to see that he is wearing a fancy late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high ...”