“... been inflected imaginatively, mimetically, ethically – since the ironies of Kipling and Conrad?) Picasso’s mural for Unesco’s headquarters in Paris. Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, done in 1958, is a defining and appalling statement of Arendt’s post-epic perspective. It aims to put the era of Guernica behind it. And it does so in a context ...”

“... Smollett’ and ‘Mr Sterne’ are at the narrator’s elbow, and a sneaky pre-echo of Mr Conrad addresses the ‘immense darkness’ of the continent beyond. Another unnamed presence might be Mr James, whose list of the ‘items of high civilisation … absent from the texture of American life’ finds a counterpart in the hero’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an even greater claim to newness. But what about the loose network which connected Crane, Conrad, Ford, Wells and James? What about the Auden Gang? Both sets of writers have been the subject of group-biographies which, like Brown’s, delineate rivalries and influences. To acknowledge such examples would he to dispel some of the glamour surrounding ...”

“... most eccentric of slices to extract from all that life – a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait?’ He knows we know the answer. These characters and stories are not less Indian than for whom the claim is made. And the same goes for the stories. The supposed centre that makes them seem marginal, or (later) seeks to ...”

“... comes out (this was also caught on the film they made). Another good chapter describes how Conrad Anker climbed the Second Step without oxygen or anyone’s help, thus establishing that Mallory and Irvine could have done the same. Peter Firstbrook’s book is better written but poorly produced, with disappointing photos. The author spends 162 pages out ...”

“... and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some ...”

“... their sense of disquiet about the challenges to American social and racial order embodied by the Black freedom movement.Johnson faced an even greater challenge in foreign affairs. He remained absolutely committed to the ‘domino theory’ that had guided American policy since the start of the Cold War. When Johnson made the decision to bomb North Vietnam in ...”

“... if Waller intends to demonstrate that the shallow ‘lookist’ he’s playing, whose grammar is black vernacular – ‘I hates you ‘cause your feet’s too big’ – also has the King’s English at his disposal. Had he lived, he could have had a major acting career – the black Zero Mostel, a lambent ...”

“... in 1981, as ‘ethnographic surrealism’? Hardly. Was Leiris really in pursuit of the exotic ‘black Edens’ he had glimpsed with the arrival of jazz in Paris after World War One? Pretty much: they led him to Africa in the first place, he explains in L’Age d’homme, ‘and beyond Africa, to ethnography’. His journal reads as a midwife’s notes on ...”

“... to know many of the significant literary figures of the day (Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke, Joseph Conrad, Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire Belloc et al) and becomes an overworked and often desperate, self-hating professional writer of journalism and criticism. ‘I live for an income of £250 & work all day & often from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. It takes me so long ...”

“... the Comte d’Artois are going to descend on France with an army of about five thousand men in black clothes made from the cassocks of non-juring clergy and studded with death’s heads.’ These were not idle fears. In April 1792, an increasingly desperate Louis XVI gambled on war with Austria, calculating that victory might save his reputation and defeat ...”

“... This involves, Havel says, ‘a deepened sense of irony and self-irony, together with humour and black humour, and perhaps most important in this context, an intense fear of exaggerating our own dignity unintentionally to a comic degree, a fear of pathos and sentimentality, of overstatement and of what Kundera calls the lyric relation to the world’. The ...”

“... if Madame Blavatsky had written them for a Society of Latterday Druids’. In a sonnet series by Conrad Aiken ‘any similarity between the poems and reality is purely coincidental: they are produced by the extravagantly emotional, rhetorical and sentimental manipulation of the beautiful objects of an imaginary universe.’ E.E. Cummings is said to be ‘a ...”

“... the book covers the later Victorian rhetoric of death scenery, through Modernist modulations in Conrad, Forster, Lawrence (a romantic throwback) and Woolf, to a conclusion in the Post-Modernist and supra-national fictions of Beckett, Pynchon and Nabokov. The strongest element in Death Sentences, as in Stewart’s earlier Dickens and the Trials of ...”