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“... in awe of its own virtuosity, a response along the lines of Sydney Smith’s remark on an essay by Henry Brougham: ‘It is long and vigorous, like the penis of a jackass.’ And yet amazingly, and defiantly, beyond its hyper-consciously clever preface, the book picks itself up, dusts itself down, and seems to surprise even itself by getting on with the ...”

“... Warrenpoint of the Forties. I went to University College Dublin once, after he had left for his Henry James Chair at New York University, and found the college echoing with the praises of the flown savant, with his sayings and with stories of his tenure. Two sorts of ex cathedra were apparent. He had made his mark, in the way that people hope for from ...”

“... In 1979 there appeared Norman Mailer’s long book The Executioner’s Song – a thousand paperback pages, as it subsequently became, on the strange case of Gary Gilmore, the murderer who insisted on being put to death, insisted that the state keep its word.* In March of the following year, in the London Review of Books, the book was examined at length by Christopher Ricks, whose piece was reprinted – at Mailer’s suggestion, or so I was told at the time – in the form of an advertisement in the New York Review of Books ...”

“... never parochial in his outlook. At the Harvard International Summer Seminar of 1965, directed by Henry Kissinger, he told Ralph Ellison: ‘I believe that the problem of American blacks comes from the two refuges they have constructed for themselves: Christianity and jazz.’ But he became more and more apolitical and pessimistic. Despite his return to ...”

“... be but as wildfire in your house and as a moth in your clothes.’ Marshfield’s daughter, Sarah Miller, subsequently began to suffer ‘strange fits’, which were duly seen as the result of witchcraft. Parsons and his wife were now seriously estranged. Mary blamed her husband for the death of Anne Smith’s two daughters, the grandchildren of William ...”

“... in films and on television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... Natural History Museum. The modern crispness of the new spaces is really no more appropriate to Henry Wellcome’s passionate, omnivorous and in some ways absurd appetite for medical relics than the institutional solemnity of the Euston Road façade is. But this exhibition – for better and worse – is true to the Wellcome spirit. The history of our ...”

“... his route to world fame. And the banality of Limonov’s ‘scandalous’ books, suggestive of Henry Miller’s, if Miller were viciously bloody-minded and thought Stalin was the greatest thing since apricot vodka. Brodsky put it well: It’s Me, Eddie ‘could have been written not by Dostoevsky or even ...”

“... to turn to, still is perhaps, if you wished to point to a sculpture of essences. It was (until Henry Moore) the cartoonist’s favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen Hokinson of two toqued ladies circling a Bird in Space, shaping themselves to its undulating line. Sculpture as essence, sculpture as pure ...”

“... a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it is far from ...”

“... highest circles. She was courted, as was Frances, by Pitt’s minister, the manager of Scotland, Henry Dundas. A further verbal coincidence gives the note of Townshend’s wit, and a sense of the importance of tears for the society he lived in. On a visit to Edinburgh he is slighted, while much is made of his witch wife, who whines of a group of family ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... for moving a plot briskly on. Howell examines the presence of malaria in the work of Dickens and Henry James, concentrating on Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Daisy Miller (1878). Both books were written before Ronald Ross proved, in 1897, that the malaria parasite was transmitted by the female mosquito’s bite rather than ...”