Robert McCrum in The Guardian:
I've made this choice for three reasons. First, because it addresses James's essential theme, the meeting of two great cultures, English and American, and mixes it with the sinister menace of his middle period. Second, because the novel is so intensely (maddeningly, some would say) Jamesian, often hovering between the difficult and the incomprehensible. And finally, because his last novel places him where he belongs, at the very beginning of the 20th century. The Golden Bowl opens with Prince Amerigo, a charming Italian nobleman of reduced means, coming to London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, the only child of the wealthy widower Adam Verver, an American financier and art connoisseur. The plot then reprises a Henry James short story of 1891 (The Marriages), in which a father and daughter become hopelessly caught up in “a mutual passion, an intrigue”, a complex tale of treachery and betrayal made more complex by the fact that James, who suffered acutely from writer's cramp, dictated it to a typist every morning over a period of 13 months. Not since the blind John Milton dictated chunks of Paradise Lost to his daughters has a prominent writer expressed so much of his vision through the medium of the spoken word.
More here.