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“... with public self-exposure and suspicious of ‘reticence or obliquity’. But we all have what Milan Kundera calls the ‘epidermal instinct to defend one’s personal life’. Never mind the front door, back door, garage door, car door (and the petrol cap), or the safe, or the desk drawer containing your life insurance policy, just think of how many ...”

“... the modern ‘weightlessness’ of being, which for Nietzsche logically followed the death of God. Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being copies Trilling’s stance so closely here that it might have been written as an exact, though presumably unconscious exemplification of it. For ...”

“... resources of Western Europe. The notion of ‘Central Europe’ – as expounded by spokesmen like Milan Kundera or Czeslaw Milosz – designated Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, extending on occasion to Lithuania. Its function was, on the one side, to draw a cultural line demarcating this zone from such truly East European (viz. backward) countries as ...”

“... that Penguin launched its Writers from the Other Europe series, which introduced (among others) Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski and György Konrád to audiences who didn’t know what they were missing. Roth not only edited the series but commissioned introductions from the likes of John Updike and Joseph Brodsky for an extra ...”

“... is a prick. Reminiscing about long and intellectually stimulating discussions in the 1970s with Milan Kundera, for which Kundera’s wife, Vera, acted as translator, he says: ‘By the time it was over Vera looked like she’d had sex with both of us.’ Why is it that the woman on whose linguistic skills the men’s ...”

“... grip of Russia – wrested them after the Second World War, as the ideologues of Central Europe, Kundera and others, have argued. The division of the continent has deeper roots, and goes back much further, than the pact at Yalta. In a well-received book, the American historian Larry Wolff charged travellers and thinkers of the Enlightenment with ‘the ...”