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“... D.H. Lawrence; he was for years Conrad’s indispensable prop; he was close to his revered Henry James, though perhaps less close than he thought. He was on companionable terms with Wells, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the ungrateful Hemingway. Throughout his life he strove to keep up with les jeunes; Lawrence called him ...”

“... from Sophocles, Coleridge, Mallarmé, Wordsworth, Kafka, Goethe, Valéry, Mann, Gide, Joyce), and starts with a lengthy re-creation of ‘The Polish Years’. Karl brings together a good deal of useful historical background here, emphasising what we, indeed, knew, and Conrad was hardly likely to forget: that Poland was ruthlessly chopped up, and ...”

“... Fiction. Today’s Irish writers, he claims, have inherited a self-confidence ‘and (through Joyce and Beckett) a sense of belonging within the mainstream of European literature’. This simple fact of literary history might also go some way towards explaining the comparative demoralisation of English novelists: perhaps it was our failure to produce a ...”

“... the heroines of slasher bestsellers – FBI agent Clarice in Silence, doctor Kate McTiernan in James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls – these heroines are independent and intelligent. Frannie is a reflective narrator, who thinks a lot about irony, destiny and control: ‘I don’t believe in destiny, although I am sometimes tempted by the freedom implied by ...”

“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... natural world, they sound off key. Yet his taste in fiction was the opposite of folksy. Sterne, Joyce, James and Dostoevsky were among his heroes; he had no time for Kipling or Walter Scott. And while largely avoiding the self-referential, he let his hair down in ‘My Hundredth Tale’, in which a writer living alone in ...”

“... worsen or remedy it. He admires writers who force their language into weird contemporary shapes (Joyce, Pound, Gadda), but his solution is Kafka’s: ‘to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination.’ For this Calvino, drawn to limits, boundaries and impossible ...”

“... or literary history. The only way the self can leave its distinctive thumb-print, from Flaubert to Joyce, is in the fastidiously distancing style by which it masks itself. Language itself may be authorless; but style, as Roland Barthes claims in Writing Degree Zero, plunges straight to the visceral depths of the self. Another strain of Modernism turns back to ...”

“... though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class coding I have ...”

“... a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his ...”

“... brief and penetrating fables, Philippe Sollers’s Women lands with the dull thud of what Henry James would have called a loose baggy monster, though the publishers describe it as a ‘post-modernist odyssey’. Women is, if not exactly experimental, a stylistic oddity since it consists of a 550-page monologue foregoing syntax and sentence structure to ...”

“... The book has its international theme (with Jacobson’s native South Africa substituted for Henry James’s America), and it raises Jamesian uncertainties about who, in the end, is the victim of whom, and about where guilt truly lies. Hidden in the Heart isn’t a book for those who don’t believe in coups de foudre, or who think that once the erotic storm ...”

“... a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never enjoyed a good press (although Joyce, oddly, claimed to like it). As hardened a traveller as Paul Theroux emerged wild-eyed and spluttering: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city ... demented and sick ... a hated city ... one of the nastiest cities in the world ... the old horror ...”

“... known as AE) in a Dublin hotel, on the very day which is recorded in Ulysses. Meeting Joyce in Paris in 1924, he tells him: ‘Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library.’ Other celebrities among the great unfictitious dead get similarly rough ...”

“... sense, as the past tense or noun-form of the verb ‘to think’, it had already been used by Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). Not all the words that entered our dictionary for the first time in 1952 were new to the world. Some were just persistent border-crossers. Among these were tapenade (which, like hallucinogenic, had to wait decades to ...”