“... criticism of the old order: the real challenge is building the new one. If others, from Sir Keith Joseph downwards, will leave Professor Elton time to get on with his work, he should have another magnum opus up his sleeve. By contrast, Professor Trevor-Roper is not among those whom one expects to find, in V.H. Galbraith’s inimitable phrase, ‘trailing ...”

“... blacks like Man Friday, who falls to earth to worship Crusoe’s magical gun, or the savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. The Americans, under the guidance first of the great W.E.B DuBois, then of the poets Langston Hughes ...”

“... for at least half a century. The best-known, or anyway the only one that ever gets mentioned, is Joseph Vance, the first of them, which was published in 1906; the best, or at any rate the most interesting, is Alice-for-Short, which followed, in spite of its great length, only a year later. De Morgan lived to be 88 and wrote seven novels, as well as two more ...”

“... Adrian Frazier’s painstakingly researched new biography of Moore marks a considerable advance on Joseph Hone’s respectful but pedestrian 1936 standard biography and Tony Gray’s lively but unscholarly 1996 Life. Moore was born in 1852 into the West of Ireland ‘hard-riding country gentry’ idolised by Yeats. His childhood playgrounds were the ...”

“... scale equalled only by Eichmann, Heydrich and the like. As Hitchens admits, he isn’t the first: Joseph Heller in Good as Gold was as blunt about it all as it was possible to be. Anyone who has studied the 1968-76 period has long been aware that Kissinger could be a very rough customer indeed, and that his role in government gave him unparalleled ...”

“... the world wars, or more specifically of the 1930s. No one more obviously belonged to it than Joseph Needham (Li Yuese in Mandarin), who was perhaps the most interesting mind among the constellation of brilliant ‘red’ scientists of that decade, and perhaps the most unusual in his ability to combine revolutionary behaviour and convictions with ...”

“... the lives he didn’t save. When the ‘torn, dead and naked body’ of one of the cabin boys, Joseph Hannah, is discovered in a cask meant for storing minced blubber – the novel enforces the idea that there is a continuity between sanctioned violence against animals (whales, bears, seals, dogs) and unsanctioned violence against other people ...”

“... in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way ...”

“... the novelist’s concern. The influence most frequently invoked is not her early idol Bennett but Conrad – although a Conrad with whom Drabble has certain quarrels. (‘There is plenty of confusion in real life, without inventing more of it,’ the heroine of The Gates of Ivory snippishly thinks, as she ploughs through ...”

“... the novel, the diary, the biography. Literature is for him, to a large extent, what he calls in a Conrad essay the study ‘of human nature at close range’. And in another, speaking of Osbert Lancaster, he names ‘temperament’ as ‘the overriding element in any artist’. For all his evident if reticent romanticism, Powell is absorbed by the literary as ...”

“... their own past, and of the apparently authoritative record of it in the Germania. Soon poets like Conrad Celtis and historians like Johannes Aventinus were hard at work pulling bits from Tacitus’ mosaic, rearranging them and sometimes forcing round pieces into square holes. As the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and many lesser princes transformed Germany ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had even been charged, the press had announced that one of his noms de guerre was ‘Conrad’ (the nom de plume of Teodor Korzeniowski) and that there was a copy of The Secret Agent on his bookshelf. In the Oklahoma bombing case, now being tried in Denver, the book in question is The Turner Diaries. The FBI, who have labelled William ...”

“... disquietingly, to systematise the revisionist view of empire. A disciple and wilful misreader of Conrad, he gave Third Worldism, as it came to be known in France and elsewhere, a bad name. He didn’t deny that terrible things had happened in such places as the Congo, but, he said, there was idealism of effort, too (remember Father Huisman in A Bend in the ...”

“... Part Two), you’d better follow through with something formidable – as Under the Volcano does. Joseph O’Neill’s second epigraph for his new novel, The Dog, is from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (‘I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved’), his first from Macbeth: ‘Here’s the smell of the blood ...”