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“... This book – which aims at monumentality and certainly achieves size – deserves to be examined with care. There has been no biography of Conrad since 1960, when Jocelyn Baines published the result of many years of painstaking research. But a considerable amount of biographical material has emerged since then: the indispensable Conrad’s Polish Background, edited and introduced by Zdzislaw Najder (to which I think Professor Karl is indebted for much of his Polish material); the minute and meticulous tracings of Conrad’s every movement by Norman Sherry, who not only told us when Conrad was in, say, Bangkok, but on which side of which streets he walked along; the more contentious but informative work of Jerry Allen; the Jungian account of Conrad by Gustav Morf; the psychoanalytic biography by Bernard Meyer; the impeccable edition of Conrad’s letters to Cunninghame Graham by C ...”

“... In 1911, George Santayana gave an address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California in which he sought to identify and define what he called, in his lecture title, ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’. Santayana had a bracing view of what it was ‘to possess a living philosophy’ (‘to have a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human destiny’), and in this talk, he outlined a schematic division, or opposition, in American philosophy, or ‘mentality’, which was to have a profound influence on subsequent American attempts at cultural self-analysis ...”

“... I take up my pen once more after this long interval to converse with my in many ways twin bro.’ Thus William James to Henry in 1873. We might put against this comments from earlier letters. ‘Our ways are so far apart that I doubt if we ever really get intimate’ (1867). But then again, a year later: ‘I feel as if you were one of the 2 or 3 sole intellectual & moral companions I have ...”

“... Of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow Near the end of The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway suddenly says: ‘I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all.’ It is a comment which might be made about American literature as a whole: writing about America turns out to be, in one way or another, writing about ‘the West ...”

“... To a person inquiring about his life, Emerson wrote: ‘I have no history, no fortunes that would make the smallest figure in a narrative. My course of life has been so routinary, that the keenest eye for point or picture would be at fault before such remediless commonplace. We will really say no more on a topic so sterile.’ Not so, responds Robert Richardson; we will say 670 pages more on the topic ...”

“... Was Huckleberry Finn black? Of course he wasn’t. By today’s accredited categories he was poor, male, white trash. So what – besides a desire to be arresting – lies behind Professor Fishkin’s clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic ...”

“... with Dickens and the Romantic poets, and it is now happening with Jane Austen. Not that Tony Tanner’s study is wilfully abstract or – except for his use of the unnecessary term ‘discourse’ – filled with modern jargon. It is, on the contrary, one of the most readable books yet to appear on Jane Austen, as well as the most interesting ...”

“... recondite Venice Desired, on the literary figurations of that city since the 18th century, Tony Tanner has shown a rare degree of excitement and curiosity about the workings of literary style, the way words come to life in response to the performative presence within them of a novelist or a poet. This new book, made up of his three Averett ...”

“... tormented enough, or that it has too narrowly, cosily chosen its torments. ‘With Henry James,’ Tony Tanner says in his thoughtful and well-paced little book, ‘English writing about the theory of the novel comes of age.’ I’m not sure whether it’s grown older or younger since. Tanner’s Henry James was ...”

“... than furious or sullied – the Prince de Clèves, for instance, and Karenin, Ford’s heroes and Tony Last. The drama seems better suited than the novel to the treatment of the pathology of jealousy, perhaps because it has a primitive association with pollution; after Shakespeare, it’s hard to know what more could be said on this subject. Laurence ...”

“... of tea and a 40-minute chat with a well-read former bookseller who’d studied Henry James with Tony Tanner. She sent me some promising recommendations – William Maxwell, Rohinton Mistry – but I wondered if nearly £2 a minute wasn’t pushing it. (Phone consultations, at £40, are cheaper.) I asked a friend who’d taught a class there about the ...”

“... who I was and considered themselves obliged to tell tales. ‘In the devious world of Villette,’ Tony Tanner said of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, most of which is set in Brussels, ‘everyone spies on everyone else, the watcher is watched with a minimum of eye-to-eye contact. It is a very voyeuristic world.’ Baudelaire, who also noted the spying, said ...”

“... of American formalism such as Wayne Booth. He shared interests with near contemporaries such as Tony Tanner while his literary doppelgänger (and closest friend) was Malcolm Bradbury. Like Kermode and Tanner, Lodge was initially receptive to new theoretical ideas coming from Europe, particularly Russian formalism in ...”

“... fix him eventually in his own particular place, which is in fact a substantially different matter. Tony Tanner observes suddenly that Thomas Pynchon’s most meaningful context is that of a literary tradition going back to Rabelais. Peter Conradi offers a dense study of John Fowles, some of it allusive and difficult for the audience aimed at, which ...”

“... in a review more or less contemporary with the novel, Mrs Oliphant took the same view. But in 1968 Tony Tanner took both social injustice and Sophoclean irony for granted, observing that ‘she who is raped lives to be hanged.’ Sutherland makes the permissible retort that she who was seduced in 1892 has become she who is raped in the permissive ...”