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“... in reality. As a youth – in Belfast, of all places – he had been under the influence of Henry James to the point of writing to the Master boldly and getting flattering replies. As for the ‘pagan supernatural’, that had been stimulated by Forster’s The Celestial Omnibus and the stories and poems of Walter de la Mare. The latter pair had become ...”

“... Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and more than a touch of Henry James. In a letter to her father, Lawrence wrote of his wish to ‘snatch’ a fleeting moment of beauty before the inevitable ‘change’ took place. The whole effect is, at least to modern tastes, quite revolting.Degas’s Miss Murray is different. He ...”

“... Pater. It was a world in which everybody seemed to know everybody: Lang’s friend Charlotte Green was the wife of the philosopher T.H. Green and the sister of John Addington Symonds, the historian of the Renaissance.But his social successes hid intellectual frustrations. Lang wanted to use his fellowship to make a ...”

“... the title Camille. Posed against a red curtain on a canvas more than seven feet high, a woman in a green and black striped gown and a black jacket trimmed with fur stands with her back angled towards the viewer, her face partly visible as she turns her head over her shoulder and raises one gloved hand in a gesture both elegant and ambiguous. Though one critic ...”

“... for years. I belonged, of course, to the metaphor people and Kleist had made me see that mine was Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’. This is the story of Spencer Brydon, in his mid-fifties, who has spent 33 years abroad enjoying ‘the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity’, running away from ‘the ugly things of his faraway ...”

“... ambiguously, has called it ‘the intellectual equivalent of Space NK’. The school’s olive green frontage is on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Library and the University of London’s central campuses, between an internet café and a hairdresser’s. When I went there a few weeks ago, the Rolling Stones were on the stereo and ...”

“... his voice as he shouts? A police car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that shine across the lake, on the man, grass, rocks and car? Although the ...”

“... of all the workshops, were decisively in favour of the Move. C.R.A. was born in 1863, the son of Henry Spencer Ashbee, a wealthy businessman and bibliophile and, as his granddaughter has pointed out to me, a serious pornographer. The mother was from a good Hamburg Jewish family, of the kind that in every generation produces a sensitive aesthete to plague ...”

“... they were making their way home after an exciting night out. They included brambles and chartreuse green cymbidium orchids in trailing arrangements that brought passers-by to a halt. Spry’s reputation was made. She worked with Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel and began to acquire her own celebrity clients. When Beaton photographed Wallis Simpson in 1937 ...”

“... more variously and with high composure, that there is something more primary than enlightenment. Henry James said of Eugénie de Guérin and her piety, what could not be said of Heaney and his, that she ‘was certainly not enlightened’. Yet when James went on, ‘But she was better than this – she was light itself,’ the respectful directness of this ...”

“... controls is incompatible with a whole-hearted return to laissez-faire. Yet the sanctity of the Green Belt is a mainly South-Eastern shibboleth which has been more warmly defended by a vocal public opinion than has any article of faith in a free economy, even though that same public is quick enough off the mark in chasing the best bargain buys in the ...”

“... revolution has had the curious result that they communicate not with other human beings but with green screens, fax machines and modems. Graham Coster and Alex Comfort have each written a Condition-of-England novel for the Yuppie age, but they have handled the task in diametrically opposite ways. Coster’s protagonist, Greg, forsakes his computer terminal ...”

“... vast crowds lined the streets on the way from Brompton Oratory to the cemetery at Kensal Green. ‘Their reaction,’ writes Mr Gray, ‘constituted perhaps the most striking, certainly the most spontaneous, demonstration of mass emotion that occurred in the capital during the Late Victorian period.’ Manning’s high repute was shattered by his ...”

“... led a Quaker consortium in buying up the land and began to look for investors. He approached Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found ...”

“... apt they all are.‘Je ne regrette rien’ would be a good title too, since the main character, Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), is a man who does terrible things but only feels sorry for himself. He does say, at one point, ‘Sure I’ve sinned,’ but that’s just a claim to generic humanity. More often he sings lines like ‘There was so little I could ...”