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“... in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa ...”

“... intelligible’ alternates with a sardonic compulsion to puncture his own effusions. Like a Conrad outcast, he constantly questions his own reality, though even these doubts can only be voiced in a ‘No-Man’s-language appropriate/Only to No-Man’s-Land’. What existentialist ever interrogated the authenticity of his own being with such ...”

“... academic way of praising a writer for his ‘unacademic designs’. Said writes much better on Conrad, another conservative ironist, but one whose conservatism and irony took the form of a sceptical disengagement rather than ‘agitational’ aggression. He is very perceptive on Conradian layerings of indirection, which suggest distancing and an ...”

“... things in American newspapers and in small magazines such as the Transatlantic Review in London, Black Orpheus in Nigeria, and Transition in Uganda. I was pleased when the widely circulated, anti-colonial Central African Examiner in Salisbury, Rhodesia, published a poem of mine and then some of my dispatches, written under a nom de plume, describing the ...”

“... knew from his earlier boat travels, where a French expert in criminology is suspected of shooting Conrad Popinga, an ex-sea captain turned teacher at a naval college. On arrival Maigret – who has been given a list of other suspects by the criminologist – ignores the Dutch police and heads off alone to find the one young woman in the group, an 18-year-old ...”

“... footnote began: ‘Later it emerges, of course …’ In Chapter 1, Dr Livesey threatens Black Dog: ‘If I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like tonight’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this.’ Sutherland adds: ‘A word like “place” seems missing ...”

“... like a thousand white angels dividing on the road, flees to the mountain! She, perfectly cold, and black, gives chase. ‘Memory’ is an extensive poem opening up large tracts of grazing far from the designated sites of family business, before ending at the bottom of a river-bed. It is so ‘ambiguous’, so dense, that there is no chance of putting too ...”

“... the speakers do not listen to one another. Of the art of Ford’s friend and collaborator, Conrad, Ian Watt writes in his recent book on that writer’s 19th-century texts: ‘The need to derive moral meaning from physical sensation partly arises from the fact that both the impressionists and the symbolists ... proscribed any analysis, prejudgment, or ...”

“... Proposer’s tenderness to ‘our Savages’. They treat their children worse than their ‘Sheep, black Cattle, or Swine’, because they haven’t yet picked up the idea of making children profitable. Savages are savages, and the Proposer opens up the Amerindian connection by invoking the expert authority of ‘a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in ...”

“... the more thoroughly it is embedded in narrative detail, the more difficult it is to make black and white judgments. This approach to ethics might be contrasted with the rule-governed morality of utilitarianism and the categorical imperative of Kant, purportedly applicable in all places and at all times. We should not draw the line between virtue and ...”

“... the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano, or crypto Palestinian, among ...”

“... Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson,’ adding that he is now writing a life of Humphrey Bogart. Popular biographies written at such speed need to claim some new revelatory hook on which to hang sales. The Kay Morrison hook might have been ...”

“... won’t wear a particular European-designed shoe because it is too much like the slippers ‘black women bought in the market to wear in the house’. This narrator uses references far beyond the Caribbean city of the novel, describing ‘the way Arabs cry for their dead’ and ‘the pubic hair of a Japanese’. At the same time, one feels an intimacy ...”

“... professionally intellectual, was not without all literary contacts, not on visiting terms with Conrad, who had a house by Bishopsbourne, but the two elder children used to attend the parties of a Mr Wells, who turned out to be H.G. Brooke’s nanny (from some early mispronunciation always known as Ninny), by creed a strict Baptist, was a preponderant ...”

“... now fast travelling news between Aden and London and Singapore. This was the scandal that inspired Conrad, who had landed in Singapore in 1883 after himself being forced to abandon ship, to write Lord Jim. As a steam rather than a sailing ship, the Jeddah was itself a small part of the transformations which affected the calculations of economy, means of ...”