“... gnawed by guilt. An aspect of that defiance, and a source of guilt, is the refusal to renounce comfort or pleasure. The greatest source of resilience against the shock, anxiety and grief of invasion, Tatyana Li, a psychotherapist in Kyiv, told me, is the universal desire to live. She repeated this several times and laughed when I finally got what she was ...”

“... on people she knew from her local pub, so closely that her publisher required a letter of comfort from the man who supplied the model for the novel’s charismatic villain (whom the novel describes, at one point, as ‘ithyphallic’, the word cut, as Hill noticed, from ‘Unicorn’, to the poem’s advantage). Shadow Dance (1966) tells the story of ...”

“... uniforms, sleep in company dormitories or small single rooms, and eat at restaurants serving the comfort food of their regions. But Phu My’s time as a capitalist garrison town is giving way to a new phase. At the crossroads where an archway marks the entrance to the city’s first industrial zone, the old jumble of workers’ beer shops that used to be ...”

“... many ‘actants’ occupying six invariant positions in any given tale. ‘For a long time now,’ Alex Woloch writes in The One v. the Many, ‘characterisation has been the bête noire of narratology, provoking either cursory dismissal, lingering uncertainty or vociferous argument.’ Continuing poststructuralist and ongoing scientistic trends in literary ...”