“... Hemingway sentences to see how they worked, Later, at Berkeley, she put Henry James and Joseph Conrad on a pedestal with Hemingway and agonised in a short story class with Mark Schorer that she was ‘not good enough’. The 1950s were the glory days of the New Criticism in university English departments, but Didion rejected I.A. Richards’s intense focus ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... younger companion’s little frilly knickers. On the way back I know that I will miss lunch in the Conrad so I turn, hardly thinking at all, into the new foyer of the National Gallery in Clare Street and go up to the carvery counter and foolishly order the turkey and ham, which is at least one hour old, and come with my tray into the whiteness of the ...”

“... 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 Leda ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years saying it would do about Murdoch. Apropos the price war, I know someone who sat next to Conrad Black at dinner while it was going on. The Telegraph was one of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... get hysterical about Wagner, but the old tropes still surface. Published less than 18 months ago, Peter Conrad’s big book Verdi and/or Wagner happily revisits Nietzsche’s dichotomy between the fog-bound, mephitic, enervating music of the North (Wagner) and the life-giving vitality and pagan health of the music of the Mediterranean – with the ...”

“... his hands and cried out: ‘Oh God, oh God.’ The accounts of the Eliots’ married life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same ...”

“... is not mentioned anywhere by Forster, so far as I can tell. Perhaps his well-known attachments to Conrad and James ruled him out. Ford was offended by the treatment of Gide in Aspects of the Novel: Forster’s casual dismissal of Gide’s experiment was typical of the British rejection of the serious study of the novel as it went on elsewhere. And Ford ...”