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“... won’t wear a particular European-designed shoe because it is too much like the slippers ‘black women bought in the market to wear in the house’. This narrator uses references far beyond the Caribbean city of the novel, describing ‘the way Arabs cry for their dead’ and ‘the pubic hair of a Japanese’. At the same time, one feels an intimacy ...”

“... professionally intellectual, was not without all literary contacts, not on visiting terms with Conrad, who had a house by Bishopsbourne, but the two elder children used to attend the parties of a Mr Wells, who turned out to be H.G. Brooke’s nanny (from some early mispronunciation always known as Ninny), by creed a strict Baptist, was a preponderant ...”

“... now fast travelling news between Aden and London and Singapore. This was the scandal that inspired Conrad, who had landed in Singapore in 1883 after himself being forced to abandon ship, to write Lord Jim. As a steam rather than a sailing ship, the Jeddah was itself a small part of the transformations which affected the calculations of economy, means of ...”

“... strangers in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master ...”

“... accursed isle! Literature, art, conversation, society – everything lies dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of ...”

“... sooner or later join the Franco-British alliance. At first, few Poles shared his optimism. Joseph Conrad, meeting gloomily with Kraków friends as war broke out, thought that it presaged the total dominion of great powers over lesser European nationalities: the extinction of Polish hopes for ever.The war came, and then the iconic day of 6 August 1914, when ...”

“... some financial security for his final years. But except for letters from faithful admirers like Conrad and Wharton, who in 1911 would nominate him for a Nobel Prize, the reception was nugatory. It hadn’t been given, he complained, ‘the least critical justice’. Within a few months he suffered a nervous and physical collapse more severe even than his ...”

“... mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.’ Joseph Conrad was describing the British naval bombardment of African coastal settlements when, in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he wrote of ‘the invisible whites’ who ‘dealt death from afar’. In Lindqvist’s history, too, aerial bombardment appears as a ...”

“... Epoque, Anatole France was publishing Les Dieux ont soif, Ford Madox Ford his Fifth Queen; even Conrad would end his career with a couple of historical fictions, set once more in Napoleonic times. Twenty years later, the scene was utterly changed. By the interwar period, the historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously out of the ranks of ...”

“... and the last: ‘Suddenly, from nowhere, she heard a clatter of hooves on the road. “A black horse without saddle or bridle cantered along the road … The horse was part Arab and beautiful, but in this context, suddenly unpredictable and dangerous.”’ In between there are hints of symbolic subplots, paths not taken, connections waiting to be ...”

“... Marx, Engels, Mill, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky; Austen, Dickens, Conrad and James; Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann; Freud and the newly translated Kafka. The books might feed a sense of alienation which was rescued by arrogance. Living in an exuberant, crudely philistine business culture, they managed to create, for the ...”

“... the stage, a Pomeranian, and another, a Pekingese, and myself. We also had a parlourmaid who was black, which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then ...”

“... waylay him, but succeeded only once, in November 1935. Clutching their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be ...”

“... castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from the trains that bustled to and from Glasgow. But there, squashed between two shipyards, almost as if it had been built after them, stood Newark Castle. Port Glaswegians felt the castle conferred romantic credentials on a place sometimes ...”