‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson – the historian E. P. Thompson – once admonished me, with exasperation. ‘Ah!’ I thought to myself. But what about his sensitivity to the little deceptions and evasions of the English which one finds in his works, and the complex dialectic he weaves between innocence and experience, for which America and Europe came to be rich and interchangeable signifers? In The Portrait of a Lady he was alive to the tragic depths which accompany such things. He was brilliantly perceptive about how the fine sentiment and the exquisite good taste of his characters mask a crude, vulgar and venal self-interest. He intuitively grasped the moral vacuum at the centre of worldly wealth and aesthetic sophistication, the corruption secreted at the heart of a refined class self-confident in its own ethical superiority. He had an instinct for the fact that individual moral choice is always also cultural and social, and vice versa. He brought to bear on his unpromising material profound insights into the finely tuned distinctions between American and European versions of civilization.