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“... career owe much to African oral traditions resurrected by historians and exploited by novelists. Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart (1958), describes the scene on market day in Abame when punishment was exacted for the murder of a white man who had arrived in the village ‘riding an iron horse’. Three white men ‘and a very large number of other ...”

“... ways. The new Norton turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten 20th-century authors added to this edition is English.) The Longman translates US multiculturalism more obliquely into UK devolution, turning inward to trace cultural differences within the British ...”

“... those exotic and not always compatible intellectual spices thrown together: Bella Akhmadulina and Chinua Achebe, Régis Debray and Mulk Raj Anand, President Bok of Harvard and Mr Yuri Zhukov, Chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, Simone Veil and Germaine Greer. Interesting and able people all ... well, some. But thrown together without preparation and ...”

“... than its edges. This is a story which doesn’t spare the imperialists, although it does, as Chinua Achebe and others have said, completely lose the Africans as anything other than metaphors for what might happen to European souls, just as American mythology loses the Vietnamese as anything other than shadows in a psychodrama. Conrad’s Kurtz is ...”

“... Naipaul’s modern Africa. The opening sentence of A Bend in the River (which so exasperated Chinua Achebe) – ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it’ – owes its tone less to religious pronouncements than to a belief in what Benjamin called ‘the march of progress’ in the ...”

“... today, while the work of an older generation of writers – Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe and the novelist and film director, Sembène Ousmane – is never without some strong descriptive trace of the dispossession Davidson has in mind. And though there are problems with this sense of a disabling legacy – for instance ...”

“... making a dog’s dinner out of the book? Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have ...”

“... were soon eclipsed by the novels of a new generation of university graduates – among them, Achebe, Soyinka and J.P. Clark-Bekederemo. Their work was snapped up by London publishing houses, although Cyprian Ekwensi, whose People of the City (1952) was the first Nigerian novel published abroad, had already cut his teeth as a pamphleteer with two ...”