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“... whenever possible, actual books and ideas, that help explain the mysterious novels and stories. Norman Sherry famously does this in Conrad’s Eastern World and Conrad’s Western World, remarkable works of sleuthing rediscovery that respectively cover Conrad’s Indian and Pacific Ocean voyages, and his wanderings in Africa, Europe and Latin ...”

“... Graham Greene which originally appeared in the summer and autumn of last year. The biographers are Norman Sherry, Anthony Mockler, Leopoldo Duran and Michael Shelden. The actual information they provide must by now be common knowledge among those who are at all interested in Greene, including those who have simply read the many highly communicative ...”

“... is so ritualised that it becomes the satisfyingly unhappy ending beloved by best-seller readers. Norman Sherry’s highly readable biography brings out – possibly without intending to – the dense pattern of equivocation runing through Greene’s life and work and imparting the characteristic flavour. At its simplest, it is the paradox found in many ...”

“... much of his Polish material); the minute and meticulous tracings of Conrad’s every movement by Norman Sherry, who not only told us when Conrad was in, say, Bangkok, but on which side of which streets he walked along; the more contentious but informative work of Jerry Allen; the Jungian account of Conrad by Gustav Morf; the psychoanalytic biography by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Conrad is certainly not short of biographers, what with Baines’s book, Watt’s first volume, Norman Sherry’s Conrad’s Eastern World (1966) and Conrad’s Western World (1971), Jerry Allen’s The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad (1965), Karl’s vast and wrist-breaking thousand-page Life, and now Zdzislaw Najder’s Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle which ...”

“... the presence of cannibals in Conrad’s story. But cannibals existed. Conrad did not invent them. Norman Sherry quotes W. Holman Bentley’s Pioneering in the Congo on the joyfully cannibalistic Bangalas, one of whom said, when asked if he ate human flesh: ‘Ah! I wish I could eat everybody on earth.’ The choice facing Achebe is straightforward at ...”

“... to Valparaiso. But the full truth, as they admit, is still to be discovered; and short of sending Norman Sherry to Valparaiso I suppose we shall never know it. I am not sure, all the same, that the authors’ broader claims can be said to stand up. One may take as a ‘control’ Stanley Weintraub’s Whistler of 1974. It is a much livelier read than ...”

“... of homage, ideally one o’clock to around four at a good restaurant, starting with a schooner of sherry, ending with a tulip-shaped glass of port, and two or three dishes in between, not including a luscious dessert or an aromatic cheese board. Such meals left me dizzy and thankful. I fainted in the upstairs stacks of the London Library after overdoing it at ...”

“... critic Colonel Higginson wriggle with her calculated and confiding archness (‘My eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves’), but she can also go straight to the point, as in her poems, and leave the reader quite breathless: ‘I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father too busy with his briefs to notice ...”

“... finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen Elizabeth II during the Second World War. One wonders why there has been no biopic, or at least a ...”

“... where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early … I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and … drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several packets of Woodbines a day did him little harm.In 1924, while still a student, he and Graham Greene made a ...”

“... he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists ...”

“... And smiles as a sick child Who adds up figures, and a hush Grips at the poised relations sipping sherry And tracking up the carpets of her four Room kingdom – is richly, and incriminatingly, detailed enough to have come out of Life Studies. ‘The Drunken Fisherman’ offers a scene that you might find in a maudit bachelor Western novel: A calendar to ...”

“... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...”