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“... 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 between ...”

“... 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 ‘a ...”

“... metaphor he had been looking for all his life, so that he was able to become something like a Conrad who had soaked himself in Beckett, or a Dashiell Hammett who had been reading Camus and Ionesco. These are wild approximations, of course. Onetti’s voice and subject-matter are his own, and their very elusiveness has played a part in his neglect. The ...”

“... up miserably writing a treatise on the subject. The authors expected to find plenty about gout in Conrad, who suffered diabolically from the malady, but found not a word. They also – and this is the measure of their industry – ‘searched without success in several continents’ for ‘visual representations’ of gouty women, or even one gouty woman. For ...”

“... and nor was Virginia Woolf. They have become themselves, whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A disillusioned devotee is the worst that can happen to them; and although I enjoyed rereading ...”

“... from blacks and Indians. Derek Walcott has been harsh, and Selwyn Cudjoe, a professor of Black Studies, produced in 1988 a long book called V.S. Nai-paul: A Materialist Reading, which describes Naipaul as ‘an apologist for the imperial world order’, as scornful of Caribbean cultural values and even, in his response to his native ...”

“... how they’d ruined the interior.) I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the ...”

“... a voice of vernacular wisdom in the novel. Early on there are signs of the war’s futility. As in Conrad’s novels of empire, human exertions are quickly negated by the overwhelming fecundity of tropical nature. ‘The company left no more mark on the jungle than a ship’s wake on the sea,’ Marlantes writes. Advanced technology is repeatedly undone by ...”

“... ground.’ She sees the Emperor Severus in Carlisle, witnessing the omens of his death – the black Moorish soldier capering before him, the two black bullocks brought out for sacrifice by a provincial ignoramus at the temple of Bellona: when the African emperor rejected them the ...”

“... the middle class altogether’. But the middle class, under another name, is in again these days. Conrad Russell, Hexter’s successor at Yale and no friend of loose generalisation, has recently envisaged ‘a new social change explanation’ of the English Civil War, based on the power of the rising yeomanry, tradesmen and artificers. I think he is right: I ...”

“... ignored and which yet proved more powerful. Best has found a wonderful quotation from Joseph Conrad, who described the Hague Tribunal as ‘a solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a House of Strife’. Conrad continued: ‘War has made peace altogether in its own image; a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of ...”

“... commercial extinction. They now prey on deeper, unexploited stocks of less familiar fish such as black scabbard, aided by electronic fish-finders that can spot a lone sardine through a mile of water. No one really knows what is down there, or how it all fits together as an ecosystem, so politicians can hide behind the comparative lack of scientific certainty ...”

“... unknown, and would remain so. Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of ...”

“... anguished by his move from French to German after the French Revolution? It seems unlikely. Even Conrad appears to have experienced his shift from Polish to English as a simple accident of biography. It was only in the European 20th century that an increase in political and ethical exile – Nabokov fleeing the Bolsheviks, Beckett fleeing Irish ...”

“... length – in sum, unlike anything in the rest of European literature.’ As early as 1917, Joseph Conrad was complaining of ‘public indifference’ to Turgenev’s works. Eliot, writing in the same year, mourned that Turgenev was the ‘least exploited of Russian novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with ...”