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“... Naipaul’s claim to be, as a novelist and critic of societies, the most important import since Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Not least because he so extraordinarily combines their traditions, right down to following James in this book to where T.S. Eliot was mildly shocked to find him, seeking spiritual life in English country houses. ...”

“... of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and has written several books, among them Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, and the recent Orientalism in which he analyses ‘the remarkable tradition in the west of enmity towards Islam in particular and the orient in general’. The Palestinians of whom Said writes number between ...”

“... precision of ‘nova’. Suddenly she seemed to have read a lot of books. She refers to Joseph Conrad, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Morvern’s palette has expanded to encompass the Updikean spectrum of emerald, cyan and tangerine. She uses the word ‘whorls’. That this was Alan Warner’s voice ...”

“... three of these who stand out most are Henry Morton Stanley, who explored the route, the novelist Joseph Conrad, and the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement. It was Casement and a Frenchman living in England, E.D. Morel, who first drew attention to the crimes committed in the Congo in the name of progress and trade. Mario Vargas Llosa ...”

“... face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad once wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said: ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through.’ Always facing it, that’s the way we have got to solve this problem ...”

“... Ian Watt began work on this book in 1955, and the intervening years have seen a boom in Conrad studies: but the thought that there might be nothing left for him to say quite rightly didn’t enter his head. What’s more, he has only just got under way: for all that it contains close on 200,000 words, this book is merely an antechapel to the main building ...”

“... books,’ he reports, ‘which in Cambridge at that time meant F.R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, whom we both admired.’ Huneeus was much impressed by Nostromo, Conrad’s disheartening novel about political excitement and hopelessness in South America. ‘Good God,’ Huneeus exclaimed. ‘I mean, the ...”

“... an emphasis evident in his admiration for the only writer to whom he devoted a full-length book, Joseph Conrad. MacKay, not unreasonably, sees Watt as part of a wider intellectual style that flourished in Britain in the ten or 15 years after 1945. It emphasised clarity and plainness in writing rather than obscurity or ornament, valued concreteness ...”

“... account a pleasant dash and stumble, but it requires enormous reserves of synonyms. It takes Joseph Conrad or Cormac McCarthy to prolong monotonous misery in a satisfying manner. When the tone is frantic from the start, supplies are soon exhausted, and even the narrator seems to lose interest: ‘There were … all kinds of combustible moments ...”

“... Time Lost’. When Swann’s Way first appeared here, nearly sixty years ago, it did not prosper. Joseph Conrad commiserated with Scott-Moncrieff, whose maîtrise de langue he thought unrivalled: ‘The lack of response from the public does not surprise me. And I don’t think it surprises much Messrs Chatto & Windus. The more honour to them in risking ...”

“... the hymn which, in some versions of the myth, the Titanic’s orchestra played as they sank. (Joseph Conrad said ‘it would have been finer if the band ... had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing.’) Berlin is ‘where Europa is at its darkest’, Cuba the locus of defeated aspirations. Cuba’s socialism gone sour has deep ...”

“... A sort of mystic illumination possessed me ...’ Yet another epiphany occurred when Russell and Joseph Conrad looked ‘deep down into each other’s eyes’. At other times whole books presented their arguments to him in the twinkling of an eye (and it must be admitted that when he got an idea he often developed it with prodigious speed). To view ...”

“... the ghostwriting became more literal. Conan Doyle only toyed with a message from the spirit of Joseph Conrad asking for an ending to Suspense (left unfinished, as its title implies, at the author’s death), but was more flattered when Dickens posthumously invited him to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The exchange was recorded in the Journal of the ...”

“... gets to know many of the significant literary figures of the day (Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke, Joseph Conrad, Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire Belloc et al) and becomes an overworked and often desperate, self-hating professional writer of journalism and criticism. ‘I live for an income of £250 & work all day & often from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. It takes me ...”

“... their backs disdainfully on the general public. Only a few wily birds, such as James’s confrère Joseph Conrad, managed to gratify both markets, stitching Schopenhauerian speculations and Boy’s Own adventures into the same covers. James’s fiction raises questions of the rift between private and public worlds; and one version of this, relatively new ...”