“... preference, there is hardly such a thing as a confraternity. ‘Very bad – very good too,’ as Conrad’s Stein would say. With us, both the best and the worst writing seems unconscious that anything else is being written. Writing in America, on the other hand, is a joint pioneering venture, undertaken in a spirit, if not exactly of co-operation with other ...”

“... same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos (1813) and St Peter’s sweaty forehead in The Vision of Judgment (1822). There are some uniquely ill-judged moments in the early work, unmatched by anything in the later (‘And therefore came I, in my bark of war,/To smite the smiter with the scimitar,’ ...”

“... that, during his lifetime, his articles were dispersed. It’s only now, with the publication of Peter McDonald’s and Michael Suarez’s thoughtful edition of his selected essays, that readers can gain some sense of his reach. McKenzie read the analytical bibliography in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make Austen possible, but if you feel her ‘distinction’ you will also feel that ‘life isn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... watch it, will find himself taken up by the Modern Painters crowd, the disciples of the late Peter Fuller. As a high-profile poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against ...”

“... who kept body and soul together on a minute stipend by writing facetious novels under the name of Peter Priggins. The Brookes’ wine shop – always known as the Office – was at Folkestone. They themselves lived at Sandgate, a more socially eligible strip of coast to the west. They also possessed an inland cottage at Bishopsbourne in the Elham ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... frivolity and public school backbone, was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge. As the critic John Peter has put it, ‘parts of the Criterion resembled a supplement to the Tablet – while, incomprehensibly, other parts were crowded with Marxists and moderns.’ Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a champion of avant-garde art who also edited the ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on 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 ...”

“... hymn which, in some versions of the myth, the Titanic’s orchestra played as they sank. (Joseph Conrad said ‘it would have been finer if the band ... had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing.’) Berlin is ‘where Europa is at its darkest’, Cuba the locus of defeated aspirations. Cuba’s socialism gone sour has deep links with ...”

“... of mystic illumination possessed me ...’ Yet another epiphany occurred when Russell and Joseph Conrad looked ‘deep down into each other’s eyes’. At other times whole books presented their arguments to him in the twinkling of an eye (and it must be admitted that when he got an idea he often developed it with prodigious speed). To view one’s life as ...”

“... ghostwriting became more literal. Conan Doyle only toyed with a message from the spirit of Joseph Conrad asking for an ending to Suspense (left unfinished, as its title implies, at the author’s death), but was more flattered when Dickens posthumously invited him to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The exchange was recorded in the Journal of the Society for ...”