Abstract
Hovering about the essays in this volume are questions of evidence, of fact and of proof — reports of the death of the author evidently having been greatly exaggerated. ‘Evidence’ means the bits of data on which one rests a conclusion. In most settings — in courtrooms as well as the judgements of ordinary life — fragmentary data of all sorts are accepted into evidence. For it is only rarely that a single piece of evidence is in itself a proof that establishes a conclusion of fact. Confessions are notoriously unreliable, and without photographs or eye-witness accounts evidence is usually cumulative and circumstantial.
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‘Artificial divisions. Yes. They absolutely bedevil us here. Always the same. Anti-French, pro-French, Communist, anti-Communist. Sheer nonsense, but we do it time and again.... So dreadfully wrong. We argue about definitions when we should be arguing about facts.’ John Le Carré1
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Notes
John Le Carré, A Small Town in Germany (New York: Dell Publishing, 1983) (first published 1968), p. 120.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Tion, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 8.
Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 109–10.
T.S. Eliot, ‘On Henry James’, in The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945), p. 108.
Henry James, ‘Saratoga’, in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America (New York: Library of America, 1993), pp. 754–5.
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), pp. 193–4.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Novick, S.M. (1999). Introduction. In: Bradley, J.R. (eds) Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27121-4_1
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