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“... he adored cats and dogs and cows and horses, but his friend, agent and German translator, Susanna Roth, is certain that he meant to end his own life, and dismisses attempts to repurpose his death (often by the same people who had stifled his surly life and enchanting work). ‘Bohumil Hrabal did not die tragically,’ she writes in her 2001 memoir of ...”

“... of the moment when a similarly apprehensive group of well-wishers storms the laboratory of Henry Jekyll. As in Stevenson’s tale, the hero of Szabó’s novel has suffered a dreadful transformation. The woman who kept the whole neighbourhood clean, who scrubbed and dusted and polished and swept, is now smeared with filth and faeces. Her once pristine ...”

“... some way perceived to be intrinsically harmless. And at this stage she puts one in mind of one of Henry James’s minor characters, Mrs Carrie Donner, who was reported to be ‘wild’. ‘Wild?’ muses James’s surrogate silkily. ‘Why, she’s simply tameness run to seed.’ Not so Dr Tarnower, rich and celebrated physician, and author of The Complete ...”

“... Carey’s populism sees only gentle Wellsian cyclists, not blackshirts. But Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth had something to fear from their masses. When Thomas Mann condemns ‘the vulgarity of Hitler’ and laments, in his diaries, the ‘wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild and stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical ...”

“... McGurl, a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature before Henry James, ascribing to the American postwar era various creative ‘innovations’ that actually date back hundreds of years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner ...”

“... sounds like the title of a novel, and the book isn’t without its literary qualities. Parsing Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Feeney notes that he ‘presents himself as a sort of Germanic Jeeves, unflappable and long-suffering, who again and again saves the day for his maladroit employer, a malevolent, egregiously Middle American Bertie ...”

“... whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a connoisseur than Henry Irving, but who must have been a terrible father, particularly at moments when he took his parental duties with Calvinist solemnity. Patrick probably inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James ...”

“... on the cover, but inside, the anxieties I’ve been talking about are more humanly displayed. Henry Sutton writes about being a ‘Broken-Up Man’. It starts with him crying in front of his seven-year-old daughter: A friend of mine keeps ringing me up to say that being a bloke and getting divorced means I’m on a one-way ticket to a bedsit in ...”

“... to look Jewish when he takes to wearing glasses. It’s a powerful piece and in retrospect rather Roth-like. No one quite says how much of his street cred came from his marriage to Monroe, though paradoxically more with the intellectuals than with Hollywood. 21 February. Snow arrives on cue around four but alas doesn’t lay; ‘It’s laying!’ one of the ...”

“... His range was astonishing, across genres and languages, and some favourites (Donne, Stevens, Roth) were very vivid in his memory right up to the end. He gracefully concealed his shock at the extent of my unreading, part of a deep courtesy that somehow enabled rather than obstructed playfulness and teasing. We would chat about the current review he was ...”

“... message. It worked partly because Leavis (and his wife, his former Girton pupil Queenie Roth) were splendid rhetoricians. It is nonsense to suggest that Leavis could not write. The prose of his lectures and essays could be as trenchant as that of his contemporary Orwell, especially when he evoked Nonconformist tradition, going back even to the ...”

“... treating every single gay male novelist (those two do almost every female), I planned to work on Henry James alone. James, for me, came after Proust. And he wrote in English. There was just one problem. My grades were fine. My GREs were fine, though I hadn’t been able to identify the line ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.’ (It’s by ...”

“... though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class coding ...”

“... devoted to realistic representations of contemporary life. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Henry Esmond, Romola and Salammbô illustrate this pattern. Lower down, but still above the stratum of Dumas or Ainsworth, figured writers like Stevenson and Bulwer-Lytton. The central fact to grasp, however (the evidence for this is graphically laid out in ...”

“... of the American canon can be traced back to Bloom’s Emersonian preoccupations. So the chapter on Henry James argues that Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady is ‘one of Emerson’s children’, who illustrates a drive for self-reliance at any cost. I’m not convinced that this claim gets any purchase on the dark intricacies of James’s Americoeuropean ...”