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“... I must (deride me not) be somewhere where I can, without disaster, bicycle. Henry James, 4 February 1896 For your internal ears and eyes I give you Celia itemised – in her surfaces as she would wish to be, complete, with her two hands and her ten toes. She is slender, small-stepping. She strolls, you might say, from the hips while her head, motionless, schoons along on the pole of her neck ...”

“... surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ‘feverishly’; for ‘physically’, read ‘psychically’ ... Mis-spelling, mis-punctuation and misquoting are much in ...”

“... too far. Wilson’s canonisation came after those of Charles Brockden Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, James Weldon Johnson, George Kaufman, William Bartram and Theodore Roosevelt. He might not have been too chuffed about that. I am an abject fan of the Library. I own, I find, ten of its volumes: three of Parkman, one each of ...”

“... Lectures at Southern Georgia University in 1993, is a celebration of the stylistic elaborations in Henry James’s travel writings, literary criticism and autobiographical works, most of which belong to his later or, as it is often called, major phase that includes, more famously, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Tanner takes ...”

“... Papers somehow performed by the Brothers Marx’. The bones of the plot do come from the same Henry James novella currently on view as a play at the Haymarket Theatre, but the comedy is not anarchic in the style of Groucho and Harpo – it is precise and well-ordered. A highly moral story is told rather in the manner of Hawkeye Pearce, before ...”

“... favoured by the judging committee. Seriousness goes with choice: significance of specification. Henry James knew nothing of the world of political correctness, but he did insist on the novel being taken very seriously, the significant subject duly chosen, and fleshed out. The result, in his own case, could become a dull though brilliantly intelligent ...”

“... on to his young half-sister. For the most part, however, she was left to her own devices. Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first ...”

“... stand, than the table cost fifty years ago when new’. Novels began to fill up with commodities. Henry James marvelled at Balzac’s ‘mighty passion for things’; for Balzac, James said, ‘mise-en-scène’ is no less significant than ‘event’. In Balzac’s novels, moreover, the mise-en-scène is alive with ...”

“... the head most excitingly takes place. I started to reflect on Larkin and pornography when reading James Booth’s highly effective and detailed study of his poems, though the subject had been put into my head by Anthony Thwaite’s selection of the poet’s letters. Booth, together with Barbara Everett, is among the few critics who have produced real ...”

“... gentile society. ‘It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.’ This, from Henry James, is one of Ozick’s favourite quotations. In her case, it is literally true, since the history of the persecution of the Jews in Europe bears down with a terrible weight on nearly everything she has written. She has approached the Holocaust ...”

“... in her slight and perfunctory novel Belinda. But this, alas, only illustrates the force of Henry James’s passionate statement to a sceptical and uncomprehending H.G. Wells, that ‘the novel makes life, makes truth, makes understanding.’ The novelists had no trouble in making Pattison’s marriage interesting, but it was not interesting in ...”

“... aspiring novelists in the autobiography. He was the Arnold Bennett of his day, not a second Henry James; he was interested in the nuts and bolts of fiction-writing and how one might make a living by that occupation. Never in the faintest degree a theorist, he was concerned only with a story’s effect on the people who paid to read it. His sense of ...”

“... Feddens: Gerald and Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. He is about to start a PhD on Henry James’s style at UCL. Toby Fedden was a contemporary of Nick’s at university: they weren’t exactly friends, but Nick had a crush on him. Gerald is the newly elected Tory MP for Barwick, a town in Northamptonshire – Nick’s home-town, as it ...”

“... played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the ...”

“... treatment of Dorothea and Will there is, certainly, some ‘cherishing’ by George Eliot (what Henry James calls an ‘elaborate solemnity’). There is too much insistence on Dorothea’s ‘ardour’ and even ‘adorableness’, and too much stress on Will’s being a ‘bright creature’. Yet in the love scenes, particularly the final one in ...”