“... but the prophecy of the final question is eloquent and looks forward to the title of a Heinrich Böll novel: Where were you, Adam? Where were we when the unfriendliness got out of control? ‘Is there no grace, no credit,’ Brecht writes in a 1921 diary entry, ‘is there no one who does not believe in our sins, who thinks better of us than ...”

“... Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Volker Schlondorff, working together with Heinrich Böll. The Schlondorff-Böll episode showed a panel of TV programmers rejecting a production of Sophocles’ Antigone because it showed Antigone’s suicide after Creon refused to allow her to bury her brother, a ...”

“... a few of my classmates in Berlin had to do with a short story we had just finished reading, by Heinrich Böll maybe, about a man who was persecuted for the colour of his hair, which was red. He lost his job; the waitresses in the cafés refused to serve him etc. The whole thing was supposed to be an allegory for the Third Reich. I don’t ...”

“... form (a writer like Borges speaks of the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson on his work, Heinrich Böll acknowledges the influence of Irish literature, cross-pollination is everywhere); and it is perhaps one of the more pleasant freedoms of the literary migrant to be able to choose his parents. My own – selected half-consciously, half-not ...”

“... to sound like J.B. Priestley at the wartime microphone: ‘In their new books’ Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll ‘have both turned into what in my childhood were called “worrits”. Since we can worry well enough for ourselves, and in any case lack no assistance or guidance from newspapers and television, this may strike us as ...”

“... good manners were not the least effective of his weapons: ‘Beware,’ wrote his friend, the late Heinrich Böll, ‘here speaks a rebel, one of the dangerous kind, the gentle and courteous kind.’ He rarely used invective. ‘The Trial’, a feuilleton addressed to the chief, prosecutor, contains a passage aimed, characteristically, not at the court ...”