“... of reason will be its coming of age.’ Never too shy to put himself in illustrious company (‘Joseph Anton’ was the codename he adopted, aligning himself with Conrad and Chekhov, after Khomeini’s fatwa), Rushdie seems to want his novel to be a future Iliad, but with a clearer moral: ‘the use of religion as a ...”

“... that had been central to devotional behaviour for thousands of years came to appear grotesque. Joseph Farrell observes that the practice of duelling is now similarly ‘uniformly judged as outlandish and incomprehensible’, its ‘canons and creeds … as beyond recall as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians’. For five hundred years men of a certain ...”

“... zealots, particularly the right-wing activist Vladimir Jabotinsky, a character straight out of Conrad. As Cesarani the Freudian observes, ‘Koestler was forever in search of his father, who had been so physically and emotionally absent in his youth,’ and the fiery Jabotinsky was an ideal father-figure. There was also the matter of the land of his ...”

“... report what he went on to say, switching the terms as his novel already had, so that, as in Conrad, the true savages become the men at work imposing so-called civilisation on others. ‘I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of ...”

“... has appeared on Dr Stephen’s intellectual horizon, racism, it would seem, has not. Apropos of Conrad, he mentions ‘the violence of Nature known to every seafarer (and, one might add, the violence of the relatively primitive societies to which he was exposed as a sailor)’. Perhaps it is as well that Dr Stephen teaches at Sedbergh, not in Bradford. What ...”

“... you know Nick Leeson?’ he asked a man near me. This scene uncannily re-created a passage from Joseph Conrad’s ‘A Personal Record’, with which I was toughing out a bout of in-flight sleeplessness. Upon my word, I heard the mutter of Almayer’s name faintly at midnight ... I don’t mean to say that our passengers dreamed aloud of Almayer, but ...”

“... Dial she was politely sure of her judgments, turning down poems by Hart Crane, suggesting cuts in Conrad Aiken, and boldly improving other people’s poems, not always to their satisfaction. But when she was taken by a poem she was full of praise, not least for the early work of Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop went to Vassar, the next best thing, Moore might have ...”

“... what others do, except metaphorically. It is part of a cultural reticence that runs from Homer to Conrad and after. You never expressly learn what Kurtz’s ‘unspeakable rites’ were, though your prurient guess is solicited, but when it comes to Marlow’s African crew, they can cheerfully be called cannibals, though, unlike Kurtz, they hold back from any ...”

“... picaresque adventuring that formed the artistic apprenticeships of Melville, Lowry, Conrad, while other socio-economic factors mean that those women who see most of the beastly backside of the world – prostitutes – are least in a position to utilise this invaluable experience as art. Norman Mailer has said that there won’t be a really ...”

“... pages, not to smaller segments of each page, ‘to avoid easing the way for gross laziness’. Conrad Gessner, who explained in detail how to compile an index on slips of paper, insisted that indexes were vital: without them, life would be too short to master more than one subject. But he also worried about those ‘who rely only on the indexes … and who ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... at the core of the Senderista cult. One might have expected Shakespeare to draw on the examples of Conrad, Greene or Paul Theroux for his fantasia on violence and evil at the headwaters of the Amazonian jungle. Instead he borrows the fluid, elliptic techniques of Latin Americans such as Fuentes, Marquez and – above all – Llosa. The Vision of Elena Silves ...”

“... He published the following eloquent statement drafted by the Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, and Joseph Reinach, the first historian of the Dreyfus Affair: The government of the Republic gives me back my liberty. It is nothing to me without honour. As of today, I shall continue to pursue reparation for the frightful judicial error of which I am still the ...”

“... Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert Cottrell(Financial Times)Martyn Goff(Daily Telegraph)John Osborne(New Standard)John Sutherland(London Review of Books)Auberon ...”

“... she has translated into French, and Thomas Mann, whose manner of dealing with antiquity (as in Joseph and his Brethren) she perhaps assimilates to her own way of dealing with Hadrian’s world. Galey suggests as much. ‘Are you sure that there’s no “autosuggestion” in your conception?’ he asks. ‘How could I possibly maintain that I’m ...”