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“... length – in sum, unlike anything in the rest of European literature.’ As early as 1917, Joseph Conrad was complaining of ‘public indifference’ to Turgenev’s works. Eliot, writing in the same year, mourned that Turgenev was the ‘least exploited of Russian novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with ...”

“... suffice – that The Invisible Man ‘probably provided the novelist Ralph Ellison, an important black observer of America, with the title for his work Invisible Man (1952)’. Again, although Professor Smith no doubt judges the quality of a scientific or literary work to be much more important than its degree of financial success, he is unremitting in ...”

“... Fanon and de Beauvoir taught us that the defining ‘others’ of Western man are the black and woman; in the beginning, however, his shadow was the forest which he cleared in order to make a space for himself. ‘A sylvan fringe of darkness defined the limits’ of Western civilisation, writes Harrison: ‘the margins of its cities, the ...”

“... awarded (to the accompaniment of some chauvinistic protest), it was commonplace to rank her with Conrad. The follow-up to Heat and Dust has been a long time coming. And, although a fine novel, it’s unlikely to keep her reputation at the sky-high level it suddenly achieved eight years ago. The narrative of In Search of Love and Beauty flits achronologically ...”

“... respecting the world, and they are the image of a world of respect.Edward’s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), elaborated the idea that becoming a writer was a project rather than a career, that you poured yourself into a series of works which in turn defined who you were. His second book, Beginnings (1975), exploring ...”

“... to the young girl in the red coat who is first seen in the ghetto, and later heaped onto a pile of black and white corpses. The significance of the moment is lost on Richard and his companion, who are characteristically preoccupied with the technique by which the red coat was created. ‘Do you reckon they painted it on the film with a brush?’ … ‘No ...”

“... virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that ...”

“... be particularly boring if only Mrs Krantz could quell her artistic urge. ‘Above all,’ said Conrad, ‘to make you see.’ Mrs Krantz strains every nerve to make you see. She pops her valves in the unrelenting effort to bring it all alive. Unfortunately she has the opposite of a pictorial talent. The more detail she piles on, the less clear things ...”

“... those who don’t know whose fault it is, and their author stops well short of suggesting – as Conrad in Heart of Darkness did – that the fault might lie in themselves, ourselves. There is, it must be said, no easy formula for writing a successful way-we-live-now novel. Doris Lessing offers one of the main precedents for a book like The Radiant Way, but ...”

“... the noise of water coming out of bottles, and a weird episode when she and a friend dressed up in black and spent a night at a hotel pretending to be interesting widows. All her friends had nicknames – ‘Damit’, ‘Horse’, ‘Aunt’ – and favoured a mewing private language: ‘I began a big pastermiece – a dragon, and a lady in a birthday-suit ...”

“... in both novels, I do not think there is a single phrase actually naming a cannibal act outright. Conrad, who coined the phrase ‘unspeakable rites’, deriving it from the vocabulary of adventure stories like Coral Island (Golding’s main source), applied it to the doings of Kurtz, also presumably cannibal and also never defined: the only outright ...”

“... oppressing blacks in South Africa draws instant condemnation because it is seen to be racism. But black upon black oppression merely makes people shrug and say: ‘Well, it’s their business, isn’t it?’ Some years back, the Philippine Government placed an ad in Fortune magazine that read: ‘To attract companies like ...”

“... him, up the Congo River – also known as the Zaire – into the real jungle, on the journey that Conrad has taught almost a century of Englishmen to see as the way into Africa’s dark heart. Congo Journey begins with a European cliché of Africa. The opening scene occurs in a ‘hut in Poto-Poto, the poor quarter of Brazzaville’. In this hut, a ...”

“... with ram’s horns on their head, was probably there for the football; a skinhead dressed in black with several earrings was probably an assistant professor; but at the convention centre security guards checked badges to make sure no civilians slipped into sessions on ‘Mayan Textual Practices’ or ‘Pierre Loti Today’. The MLA offers something for ...”

“... by something close to eager anticipation: ‘You mean, we’re going to read a book by a black writer?’ Something more needs to be said about the context of these anecdotes. The first was enacted in a traditional suburban grammar school; my classmates and I were in an ‘express’ stream, destined to take O levels a year early. The second happened ...”