“... sells popsicles), of Imam Din (who cooks and polygamises), of Hari (a gardener), of Sher Singh (a zookeeper), of Sharbat Khan (a knife-grinder) – all of them rich personalities in their own right, and all, for the purposes of the story, representative of the religious and ethnic mix, Hindu and Sikh and Muslim, of India before partition. This ...”

“... in ‘Kama’, which begins with a murder; the protagonist is a police inspector, Sartaj Singh, whose marriage has broken down – Singh is one of the many nobodies with whom Chandra populates his cityscape (the unnamed narrator and the storyteller Subramanian are two others); he represents both a strange ...”

“... music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical science. Marina Singh is a mild-mannered 42-year-old research scientist at Vogel pharmaceuticals in Minnesota. She used to be a gynaecologist but switched to pharmacology after an emergency caesarean section went gothically wrong – she sliced the baby’s eye with a ...”

“... arms hanging near its feet, was an ape; it looked intent, like an athlete waiting for the gun to go off. The next figure rose slightly, and the one after it was more upright: it was like a slow-motion sequence of a runner in the first few seconds of a race. The pistol had been fired; the race had begun. Millisecond after millisecond, that runner – now ...”

“... but one of them did do the kind of secret work Kipling describes. He was a schoolmaster, Nain Singh. In 1865 he entered Tibet – forbidden to foreigners on pain of death – disguised as a lama, and mapped Lhasa. Like Kim, he had learned to measure miles by walking without ever altering his stride; like Kim, he used a rosary to keep count of their ...”

“... hard-working and earthy, bearded and be-turbaned, and enjoined by the valiant Guru Gobind Singh to bear always the name of ‘lion’, Singh. The story went something like this: the racial pride of this community had been injured by the Army’s behaviour in the Golden Temple, and now they have wreaked their ...”

“... complex our relationship was, how important – how crucial – it was to my becoming a writer.To go back to Uganda: when I heard that he was coming to teach at Makerere University, where I was on the faculty, I read all of Naipaul’s books. On being introduced to him I told him how much I liked them, and he immediately took to me. No one else at the ...”

“... classic published nearly thirty years earlier. In V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh, exiled from the island of Isabella and living in a shabby London hotel, also finds control in setting things down: ‘Writing, for all its initial distortion, clarifies, and even becomes a process of life.’ The clarity the two writers pursue is not the ...”

“... around without any apparent purpose. Here, for instance, is the novelist and journalist Khushwant Singh on a visit to Mysore forty years ago: ‘Being with Narayan on his afternoon stroll was an experience. He did not go to a park but preferred walking up the bazaars … He would stop briefly at shops to exchange namaskaras ...”

“... such Mughal details as the flower held deftly between thumb and finger, is a Hindu: Maharana Karan Singh of Mewar. As the refinements of Mughal miniature painting spread south to the Rajput courts, they led to a hybrid style of exceptional beauty and vigour. Although the character of what is shown varies from place to place, there is little sense of individual ...”

“... argues that the US can accommodate these countries by offering them membership of clubs like the G8. China may remain a prickly ‘challenger’ but with the right kinds of inducement the democratic giant next door can be turned into an ‘ally’. Zakaria believes that the nuclear agreement the Bush administration offered New Delhi, which aroused fierce ...”

“... not how different we are from his Guyanese, but that we are identical with them. Here is Mrs Singh, the Shadow Bride of the novel of the same title, a woman obsessed by her only son: ‘Mrs Singh broke off in the middle of her tirade ... astonished by her conduct, by the realisation after all these years, that her ...”

“... of a child who knows that make-believe is no joke. A photograph from around 1900 of Sir Raghubit Singh, Maharao of Bundi, sitting on a wide cushion with his many-layered skirt spread in front, his sword in his hand and his quite astonishing divided beard spread around his his face in a black, hairy halo suggests that the formality of the Mughal portrait ...”

“... and windows shut, such shabby, reposeful doors and windows, the large signs – DATTA BROS., K. SINGH AND SONS – reflecting the sunlight. The house would reverberate with familiar voices. Sandeep’s uncle, whom he called Chhotomama (which meant ‘Junior Uncle’), was at home. Chhordimoni, Sandeep’s greataunt, and Shonamana, his eldest uncle, had also ...”

“... a cigarette. ‘Officer, you got me. You’d better send me back to the UK. Deport me. I want to go home. By BA, preferably.’ They still had a smoking section. She’d hoped for better. She narrowed her eyes and gave me another mean look, then told me to wait while she left to make a phone call. Twenty minutes later she returned and grudgingly dismissed me ...”