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“... which endured down to and beyond the moment I first glimpsed it in wartime: a city of mourning-black temples whose columns and arches were wrapped in inky, velvety fur. Who under fifty, knowing only this golden-scrubbed city centre, can imagine that?) Evelyn’s idea of a cure was to drive smoky industries out of London and surround the town with a ...”

“... forgotten local history and the occult. He was a romantic and a mystic, of sorts – his brother, Conrad, called him a ‘transcendent idealist’ – and his music, particularly his earlier works for piano, can make listeners feel so serene that the record industry has claimed him as a kind of guru. In the Satie section of the record shop you’ll find ...”

“... disquietingly, to systematise the revisionist view of empire. A disciple and wilful misreader of Conrad, he gave Third Worldism, as it came to be known in France and elsewhere, a bad name. He didn’t deny that terrible things had happened in such places as the Congo, but, he said, there was idealism of effort, too (remember Father Huisman in A Bend in the ...”

“... the misty green mountains and the blue clouds of far away. And right over the picture there in big black letters EMERALD GEMS OF IRELAND. Emerald Gems of Ireland is a songbook and this isn’t its first appearance in The Butcher Boy. It’s first seen inside the music case of Philip Nugent, a boy whose family becomes the focus of all Francie’s obsessions ...”

“... the waters of its dream across the dust of a waiting heart.’ The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham ...”

“... a clear impression whose side he is on without having to commit himself. The last reference to the Conrad controversy in his book is a paraphrase without a trace of dissent: ‘Achebe illustrates the insistence on human presence in the traditional Mbari art and contrasts this with its absence in the works of Joseph ...”

“... they could still find villages like those Tacitus had described if they walked in the contemporary Black Forest. More remarkably still, they could find them in New England as well: ‘The little settlement unconsciously reverted to the forms of village community life, and the Germania of Tacitus was more than suggested in the town at Quinnipiac.’ The ...”

“... edge. Deep lustrous colours – oils, unmixed, swirly and thick – within a wide and solid matt-black wood frame. (Nolde made them himself: he had no use for the ornate plaster gilt of a backward-looking early 20th century.) Or waving, blowsy flowers, an infinity of oranges and reds. Or an agitated sea with an oblique crack of sunset or divine mercy in ...”

“... H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine had no chance against ‘literary’ authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted for Martyn Goff’s real thing. In 1940, T.S. Eliot struck the recurrent establishment note when he labelled Wells a ‘popular entertainer’.(Dickens was ...”

“... jocularity, called his ‘ToolooseLowrytrek’ – begins on page 371, with a fan letter to Conrad Aiken written in 1929. Aiken, a crony of Eliot and Pound, was by then an established novelist and poet (he won the Pulitzer Prize the following year). ‘Sometime when you come to London, Conrad Aiken,’ writes the ...”

“... the novelist’s concern. The influence most frequently invoked is not her early idol Bennett but Conrad – although a Conrad with whom Drabble has certain quarrels. (‘There is plenty of confusion in real life, without inventing more of it,’ the heroine of The Gates of Ivory snippishly thinks, as she ploughs through ...”

“... in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way ...”

“... It is canonical in the American classroom, on television and in popular culture to celebrate the black civil rights movement as the triumph of American universalism, the vindication of the ‘American creed’ of egalitarianism, colour blindness and individual liberty against the forces of oppression that long held blacks in a subservient status ...”

“... orthodoxy for suggesting that human nature might not be intrinsically all good. He accused these black hillsmen in the Ugandan highlands of being profoundly wicked at a time when the self-evident truth that black misbehaviour must always be the result of white racism was already on its way to becoming gospel. But Turnbull ...”

“... were also on show. But the pullovers are the real stuff of legend. The Beerenberg is made from ‘black Welsh mountain wool’ and named for the world’s most northerly volcano: ‘high in the Arctic … the winds can rage at 150 knots’. Before the pandemic Arthur Beale was a niche store with a thriving digital sales operation – but who, during ...”