“... but – as Michael Straight immediately recognised – in the spirit of the world described by Conrad in Under Western Eyes. On this day, not long after John Cornford had been killed in the fighting near Cordoba, Anthony Blunt invited Straight to his rooms and said: ‘Some of your friends have different ideas for you.’ Michael Straight at first rejected ...”

“... Eliot affected to be. Of his own early relationship with Pound, Eliot merely noted in a letter to Conrad Aiken that Pound was ‘rather intelligent as a talker’, though ‘his verse is well-meaning but touchingly incompetent’. By contrast, Lawrence confided enthusiastically to one of his girlfriends that Pound ‘knows W.B. Yeats – all the ...”

“... campers at Indio in 1939, threatening to throw them out if they did not obey regulations. In 1941 Conrad Reibold, manager at Firebaugh, reported that participation in camp democracy was so half-hearted as to make positions on the camp council impossible to fill. Shindo’s analysis delivers a few hits, but from an odd perspective. You could say that there was ...”

“... for humans. Osbert Sitwell, who knew him later in London, was struck by his animosity to black men, and the autobiography bears him out. An eyewitness account of a lynching near Memphis is devoid of any sympathy for the victim. And after being mugged in the South, Davies rants: ‘This not very intelligent race half murder a man without being sure of ...”

“... other names – whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen … Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen ...”

“... in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa ...”

“... intelligible’ alternates with a sardonic compulsion to puncture his own effusions. Like a Conrad outcast, he constantly questions his own reality, though even these doubts can only be voiced in a ‘No-Man’s-language appropriate/Only to No-Man’s-Land’. What existentialist ever interrogated the authenticity of his own being with such ...”

“... academic way of praising a writer for his ‘unacademic designs’. Said writes much better on Conrad, another conservative ironist, but one whose conservatism and irony took the form of a sceptical disengagement rather than ‘agitational’ aggression. He is very perceptive on Conradian layerings of indirection, which suggest distancing and an ...”

“... things in American newspapers and in small magazines such as the Transatlantic Review in London, Black Orpheus in Nigeria, and Transition in Uganda. I was pleased when the widely circulated, anti-colonial Central African Examiner in Salisbury, Rhodesia, published a poem of mine and then some of my dispatches, written under a nom de plume, describing the ...”

“... knew from his earlier boat travels, where a French expert in criminology is suspected of shooting Conrad Popinga, an ex-sea captain turned teacher at a naval college. On arrival Maigret – who has been given a list of other suspects by the criminologist – ignores the Dutch police and heads off alone to find the one young woman in the group, an 18-year-old ...”

“... footnote began: ‘Later it emerges, of course …’ In Chapter 1, Dr Livesey threatens Black Dog: ‘If I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like tonight’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this.’ Sutherland adds: ‘A word like “place” seems missing ...”

“... Mrs Dalloway, Cousin Bette, Oscar and Lucinda, Julian Barnes’s Metroland and three works by Conrad. From a Daily Express review of The Talented Mr Ripley in February 2000, I learned three new words in the space of a single clause: ‘a conspiracy of patriarchal decorum in which even Dickie’s father colludes’. Also, from the same ...”

“... like a thousand white angels dividing on the road, flees to the mountain! She, perfectly cold, and black, gives chase. ‘Memory’ is an extensive poem opening up large tracts of grazing far from the designated sites of family business, before ending at the bottom of a river-bed. It is so ‘ambiguous’, so dense, that there is no chance of putting too ...”

“... their quotas. Leopold’s project had become a scandal, even for staunch imperialists like Joseph Conrad. The transfer of wealth away from the Free State was impressive, as were the rewards for international business and the crown. In The King Incorporated (1963), Neal Ascherson recorded that between 1896 and 1906, Leopold cleared a personal profit in his ...”

“... the speakers do not listen to one another. Of the art of Ford’s friend and collaborator, Conrad, Ian Watt writes in his recent book on that writer’s 19th-century texts: ‘The need to derive moral meaning from physical sensation partly arises from the fact that both the impressionists and the symbolists ... proscribed any analysis, prejudgment, or ...”