Discussing Henry James’s ghost stories in December 1921, Virginia Woolf paused over James’s use of the adjective ‘unspeakable’ at the eerie climax of ‘The Turn of the Screw’: ‘The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly evening hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.’ It was an unexpected adjective to encounter in the work of such a fastidiously garrulous writer, Woolf implied. But, she went on to suggest, unspeakability was in fact one of James’s most important subjects. In his ghost stories, as in his novels, James was compelled by those moments when ‘some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface’: by those incidents or instants when – in Woolf’s careful phrase – ‘the significant overflows our powers of expressing it’. Readers shudder on encountering these narrative voids or superfluxes, she argued enigmatically, because they afford us a glimpse into ‘the dark’ that is ‘perhaps, in ourselves’. William Golding (1911–93) and Henry James (1843–1916) could not, at the level of the sentence, be more different. James’s sentences are prolonged, filigreed, and devoted – with their delays and recursions – to the subtle revision of implication. His favoured tense is the conditional, his natural mood the subjunctive. His prose cherishes the verb, which most often serves as a loom-end, sending sense shuttling back along a sentence in order to begin another, minutely altered, traverse.