“... got in different ways. Usually, it arrived in my lap after falling through four feet of air. I’d chase coins from the flying givers all but into the Thames itself; a few coins bounced beside me and leapt through the bars of the railing, vanishing into the water. The trains might rattle in and out behind me for an hour without my gaining a penny. Then someone ...”

“... the family car, a four-door Adler saloon, whose wheel came loose one day, forcing Donald to give chase as it romped through a field. Elena sat in the front and always felt car-sick. The boys lolled in the back, their bare legs sticking to leather seats heated by the sun. It took about an hour to reach a mountain valley near Sinaia, where chestnut ...”

“... You’d never know from the outside that inside they’re auctioning off the fresh spoils of the chase. When I was there, at seven o’clock one March morning, a small area of a vast concrete-floored shed held rows of yellow boxes filled with fish packed on crushed ice: cod longer than my arm, skate like kites made of mangled flesh, the astonished eyes of ...”

“... There is no mercy for white Westerners who sided with the MPLA. In an encounter in London with Michael Wolfers, an elderly ex-Times journalist who covered Nigeria during the Biafran war and spent years in Luanda with the MPLA as a Marxist aide-de-camp, she sneers at his fatal offer of foie gras, scoffs at the fact that he was privately educated, and goes a ...”