“... covered their tables while seashells and porcelain from China glittered next to their books. Even Joseph Scaliger, the model polymath of the late Renaissance, who worked longer days than his supposedly industrious Dutch neighbours and complained that he could not afford all the books he wanted, boasted of the stuffed bird of paradise that Amsterdam merchants ...”

“... crisis he used threats and lies to coerce the press into co-operation. His fixer, the sinister Joseph Ball, had the telephones of the anti-appeasement MPs tapped. When Eden resigned as foreign secretary in February 1938, Ball put it about that the real reason was that he was exhausted and could no longer cope with the job. Chamberlain founded the ...”

“... were published in Austin and composed in Bastrop, in a Greek Revival mansion that once belonged to Joseph Sayers, a former Governor of Texas. Such are the cultural jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little ...”

“... ground, including a trio that left their mark on maritime literature: the Narcissus, which had Joseph Conrad as its second mate; the Grace Harwar, which took Alan Villiers round Cape Horn; the Moshulu, up whose rigging the 19-year-old Eric Newby climbed on the last grain race from Australia. All were three or four-masted barques: one or two Port ...”

“... also by the box containing the literary remains of a great-grandfather, crony of Thomas Hood’s, Joseph Hewlett, a tipsy vicar with 18 children, 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 ...”

“... of Mann, ‘the humour of which he was so proud is faint.’ Prater is discussing the four Joseph novels (1933, 1934, 1936, 1943), but as far as I know English-speaking readers have not found Buddenbrooks (1901) or The Magic Mountain (1924) too rollicking either. In his preface to the new Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Ritchie Robertson says the ...”

“... Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the ...”

“... panels of her costume like a plump English rose trying to play the innkeeper’s wife who turns Joseph and Mary away in a school nativity play. Her role as a dream creature indifferent to the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike ...”

“... been inflected imaginatively, mimetically, ethically – since the ironies of Kipling and Conrad?) Picasso’s mural for Unesco’s headquarters in Paris. Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, done in 1958, is a defining and appalling statement of Arendt’s post-epic perspective. It aims to put the era of Guernica behind it. And it does so in a context ...”

“... Modern Classics series, aligning Freud with other Modernist writers, in the same format as Joyce, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Woolf and so on. And there should, as with Penguin Modern Classics, be as little scholarly apparatus as possible: only Freud’s notes, if possible; and no indexes, given what indexes imply about a book and its genre. I thought the books ...”

“... in the margin of this passage on the manuscript of The Waste Land. Ricks and McCue alert us to Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether (‘Why don’t you speak? … What does it mean? … What’s going on in that head of yours? What are you plotting against me there so hard that you can’t say a word?’); a poem in Aldous Huxley’s collection ...”

“... and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano, or crypto ...”

“... whose long name still ends in Benton and Bowles. That little rat, Jerzy R. Kosinski, thought Conrad was a good subject to bring up with him, but it didn’t interest him very much. All the while, host Bill Styron looking a bit subdued as usual these days; we talked about Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him ...”

“... Epoque, Anatole France was publishing Les Dieux ont soif, Ford Madox Ford his Fifth Queen; even Conrad would end his career with a couple of historical fictions, set once more in Napoleonic times. Twenty years later, the scene was utterly changed. By the interwar period, the historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously out of the ranks of ...”

“... and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.We enjoy the stories about Tristan und Isolde because they indulge our wish to find in Wagner someone prodigious, to see him as a Faustian genius who gave two fingers to the god Terminus. We know, of course, that Ludwig ...”