“... to the right you will hit a stalled car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can ...”

“... option: one politician, Margaret Thatcher; one princess, Princess Di; one blonde superstar, Madonna; one lean and androgynous rock’n’roll performer, Patti Smith. In Kraus’s view, Acker went along with this weird logic, too. ‘Acker is in London, at a peak of notoriety that only certain literary men enjoy,’ she wrote in her marvellous third ...”

“... evil (at least not yet). Culturally, too, they offered few of the images d’Epinal – the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Wenceslas Square, the Crown of St Stephen; the liberator Pope, the philosopher President, the Nobel electrician – with which the media could uplift audiences in the West. Kadare might be a better writer than Havel, but apart from a few ...”