“... trend, he continues, might writers not be better off abandoning fiction altogether? He then quotes Milan Kundera, who, in his ‘Notes Inspired by The Sleepwalkers’, ‘demonstrated the need for “a new art of the specifically novelistic essay”’. According to Dyer, the finest example of this form in Kundera’s ...”

“... its rare triumphs will rarely be unblemished. So it proved with my share in the introduction of Milan Kundera to this country. I read his first novel, The Joke, in German, and the way the story went to and fro in time, together with the injection of what can only be called a monograph on Moravian folk music, seemed certain to confuse English ...”

“... and reading in China. We got everything from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Marguerite Duras and Milan Kundera. Readers had been starved for more than two decades: some good books sold in their millions. García Márquez topped the list, and as a consequence influenced countless Chinese novelists – including Mo Yan, who confessed that he struggled for ...”

“... captured the imagination of literary Paris: Michel Leiris, Philippe Sollers, Gilles Deleuze and Milan Kundera all produced high-flown testimonies to the stature of his work as a comment on the human predicament. Nearer home, the existential fervour surrounding the paintings was kept up by Lawrence Gowing – ‘The imagination that does not recognise ...”

“... Let a Czech write about Prague in 1968, or a Colombian write about La Violencia. That’s what Milan Kundera and Gabriel García Márquez are there for. No it isn’t. The experiences of Kundera and Márquez in their own countries, their Czechness and Colombianness, give their work something irreproducible by an ...”

“... has become a kind of fiction, constantly shaped and tweaked and distorted. As the epigraph from Milan Kundera puts it, ‘Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the ...”

“... the phrase. Speaking of his addiction to seven-part novelistic structures in The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera insists that they don’t ‘represent some superstitious flirtation with magical numbers, or any rational calculation, but a deep, unconscious, incomprehensible drive, an archetype of form that I cannot escape.’ Something of the sort was ...”

“... I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It ...”

“... to the reader to be merely a matter of chance whether this week will find Joe Smith writing about Milan Kundera in the Guardian, about Kafka in the Observer, or Keats in the TLS.Since every paper has some writers with which it is specially associated, I am again exaggerating – but not that much. What principally distinguishes one paper from another ...”

“... of its individual regiments and is more or less indistinguishable from the Civil Service. As Milan Kundera puts it in a reference to The Good Soldier Schweik: ‘Hasek’s army is nothing but an immense bureaucratic institution, an army-administration in which the old military virtues (courage, cunning, skill) no longer matter.’ Robert ...”

“... of reality, and of rationality, form part of the alternative fictional tradition for which Milan Kundera speaks from the cover of the graceful new Penguin translation of Jacques the Fatalist, by Smollett’s contemporary, Diderot.2 Here again are a disputatious master and servant, in an exercise of the self-examining picaresque; here again is a ...”

“... But gradually his support for the government waned. Zátopek belonged to the same generation as Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout and Václav Havel, who had grown up with communism but had begun, by the mid-1960s, to question the direction in which it was going. After the failure of the planned economy he became disenchanted with the regime, and, following ...”

“... to face with the question: is writing – is anything – worth doing if there is to be no future? Milan Kundera has asked the West, with polite irony, to imagine what it is like to work in a culture which may quite possibly be extinguished – its language, its history eradicated. Grass, in more dramatic shock, confronts the possibility that the entire ...”

“... children, hardness and softness, freedom and responsibility. In some ways it recalls the work of Milan Kundera (lightness and heaviness, slowness and speed, good immortality and bad immortality), but Cusk shuns his bonhomie, his playful puppetry. Despite what some might judge a stylistic hauteur, her world teems with personages and anecdotes, echoes and ...”

“... completely forgotten, erased almost entirely from the national consciousness.’ They also quote Milan Kundera on the struggle of memory against forgetting. Bilton and Sim are entitled to be proud of their efforts, which involved taking a toothcomb to published but neglected documents, as well as negotiating access to material held at the US Army’s ...”