'The writer [Ford Madox Ford] never saw Conrad read any book of memoirs except
those of Maxime Ducamp and the Correspondence of Flaubert; those we read daily
together over a space of years. But somewhere in the past Conrad had read every
imaginable and unimaginable volume of politician's memoirs, Mme de Campan, the
Duc d'Audiffret Pasquier, Benjamin Constant, Karoline Bauer, Sir Horace Rumbold,
Napoleon the Great, Napoleon III, Benjamin Franklin, Assheton Smith, Pitt, Chatham,
Palmerston, Parnell,the late Queen Victoria, Dilke, Morley [...] There was no memoir
of all these that he had missed or forgotten—down to "Il Principe" or the letters of
Thomas Cromwell. He could suddenly produce an incident from the life of Lord
Shaftesbury and work it into "Nostromo" [...].'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
