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“... shot full of arrows ‘like a hedgehog’, came to be the patron of archers but also of the Black Death, perhaps by assimilation to Apollo, perhaps because his wounds suggested plague sores. Unofficially, as the only male saint martyred in the nude, he supplied rich opportunities for artists and has now become a patron of gay men. Since the majority of ...”

“... had even been charged, the press had announced that one of his noms de guerre was ‘Conrad’ (the nom de plume of Teodor Korzeniowski) and that there was a copy of The Secret Agent on his bookshelf. In the Oklahoma bombing case, now being tried in Denver, the book in question is The Turner Diaries. The FBI, who have labelled William ...”

“... the authenticity of the chanting voices and the provocations of a monkey-man trickster in a black bodysuit and red parrot feathers. His white-painted skull face is the gearstick knob brought to life. He waves a thick phallic wand and twangs his bond-market braces, the cocky lord of a museum universe. We have arrived at the Upper Perené reservation (or ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... courtliness, imagination and wit in a 17-year-old; it’s the mystery of genius, attested to by Conrad Aiken, who never knew a writer (Eliot included) ‘so visibly or happily alight with genius’. Lowry finished at the Leys, spent the original ‘gap’ on ships to the Far East and back, giving him the material for Ultramarine, the original ‘gap ...”

“... writers who have been trying to clean up their act during the day, but for Lawrence Durrell as for Conrad adjectives don’t come back because they never left. If there is a mystery in Conrad it’s inscrutable, if there’s a tangle in Durrell it’s inextricable. And to stay with the latter: if there’s a treasury it’s ...”

“... can’t imagine dying; Gert can imagine his dying quite easily. He wears an artist’s hat – a black trilby, we’re in the mid-Twenties – and a broad gold wedding-ring which from time to time would go into pawn in Chemnitz, but always comes back safely. ‘Because he smoked such a lot, he had brown fingertips and bad eyesight. “He only sees what he ...”

“... wholly unhonoured in these 72 years. The critical acclaim, led by Bennett, Galsworthy, Buchan and Conrad, which greeted the original appearance of A Poor Man’s House was succeeded by decades when the book was out of print, but it has been consistently praised and recommended by Professor W.G. Hoskins in the successive editions of his classic work on Devon ...”

“... him feel most at ease. ‘It was a relief,’ he later wrote, ‘to live in among a great gang of black and brown humanity.’ His first visit to the city, in 1924, lasted only a few days, but it left a lasting impression and he was back two years later. He had already made friends in the city’s bars and cafés, and before long he was doing occasional ...”

“... it becomes possible to think, as Julia Kristeva suggests in one of many striking sentences in Black Sun, that ‘my depression points to my not knowing how to lose – I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for my loss?’ Compensation only comes, in Kristeva’s view, in renewing the possibilities of communication, in the commitment to ...”

“... slightest of sneers. Willie’s London friends are expertly sketched: a Jamaican who argues that black genes are recessive, so that intermarriage would eliminate blackness in a couple of generations; another whose ambition it is to be the first black man to have an account at Coutts. Willie does pretty well, and begins the ...”

“... got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Brontë and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading.’ More and more ‘the postmodern programme, the notion of formal experimentation as an act of resistance’, began ‘to seem seriously ...”

“... even if she can’t bring herself to take his voice off the answering machine. ‘It’s not black and white,’ Didion remembers a young doctor saying in 1982 about the condition of a niece who was on the point of dying, a proposition that finds its way into Didion’s novel Democracy, where the sceptical and uncrazy heroine says: ‘Not ...”

“... of situations of this kind with the freedom offered by the historical novel. He knows (from Conrad, for instance) how to fracture historical events in an imitation of the diversity of political reality. Through the words of Raimundo Dusa (the dandy and brother of the abducted Corrado Dusa) and Christopher Blake (an English journalist), and through an ...”

“... no regrets: Now I am an outlaw, I disavow my family, my country, I am not French any more. I am a black leader. Africa is large; I have a gun, plenty of ammunition, 600 men who are devoted to me heart and soul. We will create an empire in Africa, a strong impregnable empire … They will never dare to attack me. When France wants to negotiate with us, it will ...”