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“... his eyes on me, off me. He had a furtive tinge and a swank black overcoat – I thought at once of Joseph Conrad, as he is in formal photographs, with the not-quite-Western eyes and virtuosic goatee.Once I attended a christening at a farmhouse in a country far away. I saw a stack of white bread on a table in sunlight. It made me dream about Europe and ...”

“... and certainly achieves size – deserves to be examined with care. There has been no biography of Conrad since 1960, when Jocelyn Baines published the result of many years of painstaking research. But a considerable amount of biographical material has emerged since then: the indispensable Conrad’s Polish ...”

“... Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ventures in the scholarly profession. And (be warned, tyro) the least ...”

“... Joseph Conrad died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at Aldington in Kent ...”

“... opposite of all that he has named “himself”.’ The theory certainly most beautifully fits Conrad, that least stoical, most volatile and hypochondriacal of men, who nevertheless created imperishable images of phlegmatic endurance and unquestioning fidelity. ‘One admires what one lacks,’ he wrote with self-knowledge to his Polish ...”

“... concealed in the unaccommodating phrase ‘writer’s block’. Reading the anguished letters of Joseph Conrad, who was frequently ‘blocked’ during the fruitful years which produced Youth, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, you ask yourself why he did not shoot himself, or rather begin to wonder, nervously, whether he may not try to. The laments about ...”

“... Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.’ This quotation is taken from ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, a lecture delivered by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as long ago as 1974 and now collected in Hopes and Impediments. In City Without Walls, W ...”

“... and now find a place in the story. The greasy trilby hat Ford Madox Ford put to dry in Jessie Conrad’s oven, provoking the only outburst of wrath ever seen on the part of that placid lady; the ‘good sandwiches’ which the soon-to-be-cast-off Hadley Hemingway promised to make for her husband’s outing to the races at Longchamps; ‘black-eyed ...”

“... A great many Conrad letters have already been published, notably in Jean-Aubry’s Life and Letters, but also in smaller collections containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French ...”

“... A biography of Conrad that makes no claim to add to the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account of this mostly painful career; and not everybody will be put off by Mr Tennant’s not saying anything very interesting about the fictions, of which he thinks Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are the best ...”

“... topic and occasion. It might be said that the period covering the lives of Shaw (1865-1950) and Conrad (1857-1924) was not only the last age of letter-writing – the telephone was slowly taking over – but also its great age, a terminal flowering of the genre. It was still necessary to write letters and still possible to discourse fluently and informally ...”

“... to offer. Ford’s chatty and opinionated The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (1930) contains many sweeping and unscholarly judgments, but its fundamental conviction that ‘the art of the novel is so difficult a thing that unless a man’s whole energies are given to it he had much better otherwise occupy himself’ is ...”

“... Writing for the centenary celebrations of the Trafalgar victory one hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad produced a remarkable, and peculiar, essay arguing that Nelson was a great, and a modern, artist. His genius was to revolutionise ‘not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself ...”

“... on the Michael X murders in Trinidad, five on Argentina and Uruguay, one on the Congo and one on Joseph Conrad – are held together by Conradian preoccupations. They represent an ‘effort of thought and sympathy’, an effort that ‘does not stop with the aspect of the land. It extends to all men in these dark and remote places who, for whatever ...”

“... century, there is more than a little of the world – economic and also human – set forth by Joseph Conrad in Nostromo (1904), a novel circling about a fictional South American silver mine, and bound up with international politics and finance. Vermeer’s Hat shows that something like the world Conrad describes ...”