Hints and tips:
...Set in the smog of the Industrial Revolution, it depicts the capital in gothic glimpses: “At the butcher’s, in the pile of pink sheep pluck, the lungs of city animals were black and half the price”....
...He had originally feared a slipped disc, but tumours were found in his neck, lung, kidneys and lymph....
...At times, their quest for survival seems as incomprehensible as the gunboats in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness firing aimlessly into the jungle....
...She spent eight years driving a coal buggy in the mines and says she probably has black lung, a disease caused by exposure to coal dust. “It’s hard work,” she says “but it’s a living.”...
...Doll grew up in London’s Knightsbridge in “a magnificent 18th-century house”, writes his magnificent biographer Conrad Keating....
...Decency and predation, hospitality and alienation, mingle in a yarn that holds echoes, both in form and tension, of Conrad’s Lord Jim....
International Edition