“... even if she can’t bring herself to take his voice off the answering machine. ‘It’s not black and white,’ Didion remembers a young doctor saying in 1982 about the condition of a niece who was on the point of dying, a proposition that finds its way into Didion’s novel Democracy, where the sceptical and uncrazy heroine says: ‘Not ...”

“... of situations of this kind with the freedom offered by the historical novel. He knows (from Conrad, for instance) how to fracture historical events in an imitation of the diversity of political reality. Through the words of Raimundo Dusa (the dandy and brother of the abducted Corrado Dusa) and Christopher Blake (an English journalist), and through an ...”

“... no regrets: Now I am an outlaw, I disavow my family, my country, I am not French any more. I am a black leader. Africa is large; I have a gun, plenty of ammunition, 600 men who are devoted to me heart and soul. We will create an empire in Africa, a strong impregnable empire … They will never dare to attack me. When France wants to negotiate with us, it will ...”

“... of Dorian Gray in 1891, was the site where many artists, including Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Conrad, James and Ford Madox Ford, allowed their doubled selves, and their work full of masked selves, secret agents, secret sharers and sexual secrets, to flourish and further duplicate. Wilde in London was both an Englishman and an Irishman, an aristocrat and ...”

“... courtyard onto Sykes Street and snuffs the complex air – turpentine, fish-meal, mustard, black lead, the usual grave, morning piss-stink of just-emptied night jars. He snorts once, rubs his bristled head and readjusts his crotch. He sniffs his fingers, then slowly sucks each one in turn, drawing off the last remnants, getting his final money’s ...”

“... find two crones ‘guarding the door of Darkness’, two tricoteuses whom he describes ‘knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Avel Old knitter of black wool,’ he ...”

“... experience racing fast cars, and lies dying unnoticed while her chums drink cocktails; and in Black Mischief Basil Seal unwittingly eats his fiancée, Prudence, who has been cooked up into a stew.That last novel bears its modernist credentials most clearly: it is a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, done the second time as farce. Basil is Waugh’s version ...”

“... battles. In all this, what fascinates Enright most is the wealth: Eliza’s clothes, her black carriage, her jewels, her bird collection (including a chained pet vulture), her amazing menus in times of famine, her building of theatres and palaces: And I knew, at that moment, what money was for. It was so you could have things that were ...”

“... Prey do Beckmesser in an otherwise dreary Meistersinger at the Met. Rather than the neurotic, black-suited Shylock figure regularly trundled out, someone who barks more often than he sings, Prey’s Beckmesser was a pouty, vaguely adolescent, and extremely vulnerable middle-aged man, his insecure learning as a shield for his sexual uncertainties. But the ...”

“... their way to Germany. Fischer concluded that mixed-race offspring (of Boers or German settlers and black Africans) were inferior to the former but superior to the latter, and decided they were suitable as a kind of non-commissioned officer class in the police, postal service and other arms of the state. As a useful if inferior race, they should be ...”

“... I should love you the more because I had mangled you.Sending this (as part of a sequence) to Conrad Aiken, Eliot wrote: ‘Do you think that the Love Song of St Sebastian part is morbid, or forced? ... Does it all seem very laboured and conscious?’ Eliot has already moved into his self-correcting mode: of course the poem was morbid and forced, and he ...”

“... to and convey his culture’s inner voice. Equally rare is the quality of his English prose. Like Conrad, of whom he’s an admirer, Ajami fell under the spell of the English language, and this new book displays his skills as scholar, as stylist and as literary critic. The title comes from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the book in which T.E. Lawrence described ...”

“... quoted by Sampson, Moore is almost prepared to solve the riddle of why this book and the later Black Robe work in ways his other fictions do not: I’ve felt as a writer that man’s search for a faith ... is a major theme. For one kind of novelist it’s the big and ultimate theme. If you’re an English novelist you write novels of manners, novels of ...”

“... learned to look after himself among sailors in far-flung ports, in the real worlds of which Conrad and Kipling have left grimly romantic records, so that carrying a knife, and readily using it in a scrap, may just have been what all tough sailors do. Even so, we had a problem. The explanation that the twenty-year-old killer had knocked about where life ...”

“... one instance, India in another – the descriptions of which are done by a parodist, a reader of Conrad or Marguerite Duras perhaps, not by a concerned traveller. But for as long as Echenoz remains at home, in Paris or the provinces, place stands out in his novels by its ordinariness, as a rather mucky environment, whether indoors or out, that badly needs ...”