“... say she was tired, she was ‘all done up’; petrol was ‘juice’ and if she wasn’t keen on doing something she’d say ‘I’m darned if I will.’ All her conversation was impregnated with the vocabulary of her peculiar brand of Catholic fanaticism (‘the dire importance of justice deeds’). It was the language of the leaflets she ...”

“... That sounds like fair comment. Among other contemporaries there were novelists who took a keen practitioner’s interest in developing new ways of relating fabula and syuzhet and, as a mark of their difference, avoiding the straightforward representation of causality, desiring to alter the emphasis, to light scenes in a way that could not be achieved ...”

“... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke ...”

“... from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor ...”

“... the former speaking on occasion of his ‘childlike innocence’, the latter comparing him to Peter Pan. Gopal’s image is more telling still: early on, Nehru ‘made a cradle of emotional nationalism and rocked himself in it’, as if a child cocooning himself to sleep away from the outside world. He had, of course, many more adult qualities: hard ...”