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“... not more real, then more unmanageable, harder for the mind to lay hold of, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Conrad. I think Scorsese wants us to feel a sympathy for Sheeran that I, for one, am a long way from feeling, but what if both he and his daughter are right? What if the world is as dangerous as he thinks it is, and as fully devoted to power and ...”

“... In the first book I wrote, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, published more than thirty years ago, and then in an essay called ‘Reflections on Exile’ that appeared in 1984, I used Conrad as an example of someone whose life and work seemed to typify the fate of the wanderer who becomes an accomplished writer in an acquired language, but can never shake off his sense of alienation from his new – that is, acquired – and, in Conrad’s rather special case, admired home ...”

“... Somerleyton, his ticket satchel slung about him. Later, in a section on the Belgian Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted ...”

“... as Carson puts it on the back cover, ‘a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night’. She adds: ‘The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.’ They are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be ...”

“... Jessie Conrad remembered his visit: Sir Roger Casement, a fanatical Irish protestant, came to see us, remaining some two days our guest. He was a very handsome man with a thick, dark beard and piercing, restless eyes. His personality impressed me greatly. It was about the time when he was interested in bringing to light certain atrocities which were taking place in the Belgian Congo ...”

“... himself was, long before his death, an uneasy survivor from a vanished age. Younger than Conrad or Yeats or Kipling, his mind and outlook seem fixed, as theirs do not, in an epoch that itself did not survive his prime – and this in spite of the reputation he enjoyed, in his heyday, as an enlightened propagandist. Half a century on, the main ...”

“... a heartbeat. Crime novelists – and of major rank – existed, to be sure, in the Twenties. Joseph Conrad had just died and Graham Greene was a young man getting published under the apologetic label of ‘entertainment’, but one glimpse of Minty shows the quality. Character is an elusive quality, but without it crime writing wouldn’t exist, any ...”

“... upturned face.’ Mr Fried says that such passages conform to the intentions of Crane’s friend Joseph Conrad: ‘My task,’ wrote Conrad, ‘is, by the power of the written word ... before all, to make you see.’ What we actually see are words upon a page, but normally reading these words will induce us to imagine ...”

“... first in Greece, then in Cuba; a couple of years in England, where he made a deep impression on Conrad, Henry James and others; final illness and death. The chief woman in Crane’s life, Cora Taylor, belongs to the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches ...”

“... Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at ...”

“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”

“... including Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, Waterton’s Wanderings in South America, the novels of Joseph Conrad and the plays of Shakespeare. Professor Smith is loyally encomiastic over nearly all of Wells’s fiction. But his prime devotion is to the Wells of the ‘mission’, and I confess to being left wondering whether this aboundingly prosaic ...”

“... consumed it with fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that ...”

“... for respecting the world, and they are the image of a world of respect.Edward’s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), elaborated the idea that becoming a writer was a project rather than a career, that you poured yourself into a series of works which in turn defined who you were. His second book, Beginnings ...”

“... consisted of Middlemarch (Virginia Woolf’s nomination), the works of Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, Dickens’s Hard Times and half of Daniel Deronda. The ‘great tradition’ doubtless stands for something much less rigorous in Mr Patten’s mind, but it is nevertheless likely to deny to early adolescents the opportunity ...”