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“... of situations he had once imagined. The writers who met him in England – Wells, Kipling, Conrad, even the ever sceptical Henry James – were fascinated by Crane’s besoin de la fatalité, his air, which Scott Fitzgerald was to hit off so well in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed of. Lord Jim ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... surgeon and the likewise bedewed, glinting scalpel. Around the offending hand Eakins portrayed in black and white flecked with red the retracted thigh incision of a prostrate charity patient, the activities of five surgical assistants, and the recoiling mother of the abject, foreshortened figure. Some would say that such perspective foreshortening with some ...”

“... topic and occasion. It might be said that the period covering the lives of Shaw (1865-1950) and Conrad (1857-1924) was not only the last age of letter-writing – the telephone was slowly taking over – but also its great age, a terminal flowering of the genre. It was still necessary to write letters and still possible to discourse fluently and informally ...”

“... had news editors on other papers demanding similar stuff from their own reporters in Brussels. Conrad Black, then the owner of the Telegraph and himself on the receiving end of several Johnson lies, was delighted. When Johnson was about to become prime minister in the summer of 2019, Black saluted his old ...”

“... of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and that of Liberal Democratic politics today. Indeed, Conrad Russell goes further than that; he not only makes a claim for continuity over a very long period, but maintains that this sprang from a common root in liberal political philosophy, especially that of Locke, Bentham and Mill. One may perhaps put aside for ...”

“... well aware of the new techniques, new styles of ‘treatment’, currently being explored by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, and aware also of the new rules of the game as promulgated by Henry James with his passion for ‘doing’. Bennett greatly admired Conrad, but decided against this kind of ‘doing’. The Old ...”

“... in his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994). In a dystopian Oakland of the near future, Conrad Metcalf, a private eye and narrator descended from Philip Marlowe, goes to see the estranged wife of a client who’s been killed: ‘I think you’re in a little deeper than you say … Now you want very much for me to leave with the impression that you ...”

“... our relationship to it. Some would say that’s just as well. ‘The conquest of the earth,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Today Congo – which was described as a ‘geological scandal’ after copper was discovered in Katanga in 1892 – accounts for less than 1 per cent of the world’s minerals in terms of ...”

“... flavoured with the speech habits of a foreign idiom. ‘It would make a dog think,’ ‘you long black bastard’, ‘It’s a grand class of a day,’ ‘He was like a shook fox,’ ‘trying to keep the chat from going dark’, ‘a lock of food’: such phrases are as foreign to English ears as Healy’s writing is remote from the English novel of ...”

“... which races have defeated and enslaved each other, in which they have met and married, in which a black mercenary might marry a daughter of Venice. For much of its course, the new novel takes all this for granted. It is what is likely to occur. Races insult each other, and make war, and make love, and they may mix these activities up. At the same time, the ...”

“... his ticket satchel slung about him. Later, in a section on the Belgian Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted growth of its ...”

“... influencing its tone and content. They are Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stephen Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad – and H.P. Lovecraft. The last-named crops up almost as a joke when Smiricky’s girlfriend buys some farcical ‘sex-aids’ at a ‘Lovecraft’ shop: he tells her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he recommends students to ...”

“... which endured down to and beyond the moment I first glimpsed it in wartime: a city of mourning-black temples whose columns and arches were wrapped in inky, velvety fur. Who under fifty, knowing only this golden-scrubbed city centre, can imagine that?) Evelyn’s idea of a cure was to drive smoky industries out of London and surround the town with a ...”

“... with symbolic situations from the New England past, but he could not get very far along that road. Conrad had the luck to possess a ready-made ‘dense’ world in a ship and its crew, from which he could later colonise and create land life. But the problem as James had perceived it did not go away. Indeed it increased and spread. There is a sense in which we ...”