“... by something close to eager anticipation: ‘You mean, we’re going to read a book by a black writer?’ Something more needs to be said about the context of these anecdotes. The first was enacted in a traditional suburban grammar school; my classmates and I were in an ‘express’ stream, destined to take O levels a year early. The second happened ...”

“... of irony comes at a far later stage. ‘Women, children and revolutionists hate irony.’ Conrad meant, as a weapon used against them. The first and the last hate it while understanding what their attacker is up to; the child hates it because he does not. One is usually adolescent before one can be certain whether adults are speaking seriously, or ...”

“... tempting one to guess the meanings of the words. Everything in Disgrace is as shipshape as in Conrad, and the mood is no less dark. Coetzee also becomes an inquisitor, sometimes almost playful, of fictional structures. In his later books he seems sometimes to have become impatient with anything that smacks of routine composition. Summertime is ...”

“... fiery with the end of autumn and the cattle, which grazed with seemingly no movement at all, were black. I didn’t know anyone there. A Libyan friend had written to say that there was a Syrian poet who taught at the University of Arkansas. But I couldn’t remember her name, and the email he sent me seemed to have vanished. On the drive from the airport to ...”

“... conference denouncing the FBI, which had targeted her in the 1960s for her involvement with the Black Panthers. In his own suicide note, headed ‘For the press’, a year later, he wrote: ‘No connection with Jean Seberg. Aficionados of broken hearts should apply elsewhere.’ Gary didn’t stop writing while he was a Hollywood spouse, but he knew he was ...”

“... served as a rallying-point for supporters of Wilde and Beardsley, including Beerbohm, Carpenter, Conrad, Dowson, Havelock Ellis, Hueffer, Shaw and Yeats. The Savoy fizzled to an end (commercially at least) when W.H. Smith’s refused to distribute it after issue Number 3, on account of an illustration to an article by Yeats. Yeats later recalled how ‘the ...”

“... on while she embedded herself deep in the heart of the beast, from whence she would pluck out the black tumour that was growing there, larger every day. Ursula isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in ...”

“... was a good adventure yarn, plugged into old-fashioned romantic Africa, where Communists lead a Black insurrection against sympathetically-drawn Whites. Many years later, van der Post returned to the dastardly Communists (this time they became Chinese) in a double-decker novel of boy-and-girl in the Kalahari, fleeing from their massacred homestead and led ...”

“... which include studies of prominent writers as well as politicians – Wells and Bennett, Conrad and Shaw, as well as Lloyd George and his master, Beaverbrook – show a deeper talent for serious portraiture. The sketch, reproduced in this book, for his Asquith, described by Low as ‘aloof, old, worn, uncommunicative and more than a little ...”

“... a host of names, once formidable but now largely forgotten: Seguin de Badefol, le Petit Meschin, Conrad Landau, Jacopo dal Verme. A handful rose clear of the ordinary run of successful adventurers to higher influence and more lasting fame. No 14th-century mercenary captain rose as high as Francesco Sforza did in the 15th century: he married the only child ...”

“... on the tide and facing Birkenhead docks. In the foreground is a tugboat with a red, white and black funnel; in the middle of the funnel is a black diamond, and in the middle of the diamond, the letter ‘R’, painted white. ‘R’ for Rea: the tug was a Rea boat, the Maplegarth, and she was crossing the bow of the ...”

“... as laden with artifice as any other literary convention. Ford Madox Ford, in a passage from Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, brilliantly skewers the claim that a certain prose style – that of realism – faithfully and objectively captures historical events and mental activity: Life does not say to you: in 1914 my next-door neighbour, Mr ...”

“... the novels are divided into two parts, of around eight chapters each, with chiming subtitles: ‘Black Swans/White Whales’, ‘False Friends/True Enemies’, ‘Something like the Sun/Nothing like the Rain’. Part One begins with an imaginary visitor or observer – someone sitting on the top deck of a bus stuck in traffic on the street outside; a cat; a ...”

“... whose long name still ends in Benton and Bowles. That little rat, Jerzy R. Kosinski, thought Conrad was a good subject to bring up with him, but it didn’t interest him very much. All the while, host Bill Styron looking a bit subdued as usual these days; we talked about Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him ...”

“... like ‘Nor is it written’ has many Gravesian lines, but the overall impression is more like Conrad Aiken and other American poets of the time than Graves’s own emphatically English idiom. But it may well be that the idea of the ‘cool web of language’, which Graves worked up into one of his most memorably articulated poems, came from Laura Riding ...”