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“... For three hours cries of anguish were heard like some vast choir singing a death song.’ Joseph Conrad wrote with a ‘certain bitterness’ shortly after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ...”

“... possession of a rarely seen film by Andrzej Wajda, Smuga cienia, from 1976. It is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short, openly autobiographical novel The Shadow-Line (1916). Wajda conceived the film as a modest docudrama based on Conrad’s last mission at sea. The British government, in the thick of the First World ...”

“... He turns out, in fact, to be no mere horse thief but an arms-dealer, having dealings with Joseph Conrad, but that is slipping the sliderule ahead. ‘He understood that San Juan de la Cienaga was too narrow for his dreams. Then he liquidated his lands and animals and moved with new impetus and seventy thousand gold pesos to this ruined city and ...”

“... favourite Hemingway sentences to see how they worked, Later, at Berkeley, she put Henry James and Joseph Conrad on a pedestal with Hemingway and agonised in a short story class with Mark Schorer that she was ‘not good enough’. The 1950s were the glory days of the New Criticism in university English departments, but Didion rejected I.A. Richards’s ...”

“... like an old film? It’s hard to get a grip on things when the ridiculous is so rampant. Or as Joseph Conrad puts it in another situation, it’s difficult to take many violent people as seriously as the incidental atrocity of their methods deserves. He was thinking of Latin American dictators, but the remark applies perhaps even more to Al Capone ...”

“... turned the nation into a gloomy building site run by an overweight nonentity whom no one, bar Joseph Conrad, seems to have admired. The arrival of Robb’s Rimbaud in Paris, in the aftermath of the war with Prussia and the suppression of the Commune, is so shocking to the remnants of chaise-longue bohemia that they turn against him with a ...”

“... his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with ...”

“... to rewrite history from the bottom up. To revise the Bay of Pigs fiasco. To turn Vietnam into a Joseph Conrad romance. To multiply the Kennedy conspiracies to the point where no sane person cares what happened. Out-spooked by ghost writers. The plot lost. Hydra-headed narratives racing towards an awful X-Files climax. I’d just finished reading Mr ...”

“... would sooner or later join the Franco-British alliance. At first, few Poles shared his optimism. Joseph Conrad, meeting gloomily with Kraków friends as war broke out, thought that it presaged the total dominion of great powers over lesser European nationalities: the extinction of Polish hopes for ever.The war came, and then the iconic day of 6 August ...”

“... of ‘collectivism’, both the Webbs’ variety and that imperialist collectivism represented by Joseph Chamberlain. Yet he had little viable or credible to offer as an alternative – at most, a vague romanticism about ‘feudalism’, as supposedly incarnated in the English country gentleman, and an equally vague notion (perhaps this came a little ...”

“... Katherine 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 ...”

“... through mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.’ Joseph Conrad was describing the British naval bombardment of African coastal settlements when, in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he wrote of ‘the invisible whites’ who ‘dealt death from afar’. In Lindqvist’s history, too, aerial bombardment ...”

“... Strangers, and Other Screenplays. Perhaps the most interesting of these scripts is his version of Joseph Conrad’s Victory. It comes out like Pinter’s play The Birthday Party – where Goldberg, a jaunty Jew, and McCann, a morose Irishman, descended upon the reclusive Stanley in a seaside town, to demolish him with interrogations. GOLDBERG: Don’t ...”

“... criticism of the old order: the real challenge is building the new one. If others, from Sir Keith Joseph downwards, will leave Professor Elton time to get on with his work, he should have another magnum opus up his sleeve. By contrast, Professor Trevor-Roper is not among those whom one expects to find, in V.H. Galbraith’s inimitable phrase, ‘trailing ...”

“... blacks like Man Friday, who falls to earth to worship Crusoe’s magical gun, or the savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. The Americans, under the guidance first of the great W.E.B DuBois, then of the poets Langston Hughes ...”