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“... After thirty years teaching German literature and writing radio plays, my father suddenly began to write fiction. Our Conquest was his fifth book in five years, and the second to be translated into English. (He has since published three others in Germany). The sense of the possessive in the title is objective: it is we who have been conquered. The book plays for roughly the first 24 hours of peace in a small town in Germany, on a Wednesday in May 1945; and yet, as we shall see, and as the translation has it, a little fortuitously, because the word is Ruhe (‘quiet’), ‘there’s never a moment’s peace in our town ...”

“... Patricia Beer’s Selected Poems contain work composed over a period of two decades. They are a tribute to her consistency rather than to her development: I don’t find myself skipping pages because her inspiration underwent a brief eclipse, or took a direction I happen to dislike. Nor do I turn to the newest or the oldest poems more readily: they are too much of a piece ...”

“... Diplomatic Delicates at the piss conference. The Recovery It isn’t that the pieces are in place – The places is in pieces. d.g.pres. Salinas de Gortari or One Man’s Mexico The forty-first country to introduce Hair-extension treatment ...”

“... Acid rain from the Ruhr strips one pine in three ... To supplement their living, the neutral Danes let out their houses during the summer months – exposure, convexity, clouds and the shadows of clouds. Wild grass grows on the manure of their thatch. There are concrete bunkers among the sand-dunes – bomb-shelters, or part of Heligoland and the V2s ...”

“... Nicotine The filter crumples – a cruel exhilaration as the day’s first cigarette draws to a close. The optician’s colours turn to a dizzy whiteness in my solar plexus ... With longing I speculate on Heimito von Doderer’s excursus on tobacco – the pharmaceutical precision of the true scholar. Diablerie Your ringed hands clutch your elbows. In your arms is someone else’s child, a black-eyed baby girl dressed like His Satanic Majesty in a red romper suit: a gleeful crustacean, executing pincer movements ...”

“... I had made a religion of his will, the Papal Bull of his Infallibility ... He chose for both of us, and I was happy. Three bags full. He had an affair and told me. That he was impelled to it by loneliness and a long curiosity. How can I forget it? They got drunk, had sex, and lay in bed watching TV. It’s as obvious as though I’d done it myself ...”

“... Ingerlund The fat boy by Buddha out of Boadicea with the pebbledash acne and half-timbered haircut, sitting on the pavement with his boots in the gutter – we must have made his day when we pulled over and asked him for the site of the Iron Age fort in his conservation village. My Life and Loves Frank Harris. And a syringe for afters. Parerga In the bedside drawer of a hotel room in the black naugahyde and pigtail German Eighties, I came upon the Yellow Pages and a Gideon Bible, one of them – which one? – pregnant with the local chickenhawk guide ...”

“... Catechism My father peers into the lit sitting-room and says, ‘Are you here?’ ... Yes, I am in one of his cloudy white leather armchairs, with one foot not too disrespectfully on the table, reading Horvâth’s Godless Youth. Without another word, he goes out again, baffling and incommunicable, the invisible man, dampening any speculation. Open House Rawlplugs and polyfilla ...”

“... Cooking for One I put five small potatoes in a saucepan, hold it under the cold tap till they’re covered with water, add a squirt of washing-up liquid. – There’s a man who likes his life. November Eine Krähe hackt der anderen [nicht] die Augen aus. German proverb(s) Crows on oaks and cranes and cooling towers, the sky cracking up, and crows investigating the cream of whatever crust cracks yellow, milling early birds, Styrofoam beaker of coffee, refill, refill, and a spot of red-eye gravy ...”

“... Industry undressing in front of Agriculture – not a pretty sight. The subject for one of those allegorical Victorian sculptures. An energetic mismatch. But Pluto’s hell-holes terminate in or around the flower-meadows and orchards of Proserpine. Ceres’ poor daughter is whisked away by the top-hatted manufacturer on his iron horse ... Brick huts in the fields, barred mine-entrances from the last century, narrow-gauge railways, powdery cement-factories ...”

“... Austria Seventeen languages under the thumb of one, and that not even German. The Habsburgs. The blind, glassy double-windows are flytraps. Their yellow barracks – justice, education, government – smelling of floor-polish and disinfectant ... An empire ruled from a set of converted barns. Monsters of the Deep We could never understand how it worked: their relationship was unfathomable ...”

“... A sort of overgrown phial, opaque blown glass of the sort we once saw them making at Murano, whitish – with blue? with yellow? And sticking out of it that odd trouvaille, a dried yard of was it hogweed, Schweinekraut, Schweinswurzel, something swinish about it, some hollow dill-like plant withered to articulate straw that my father half-inched, like a spindly triffid on the steel table ...”

“... Her mother was her father’s senior by something like twenty years; a difference she was proud of. Most recently she was tall, shapely, and engaged to her date at home, though still our age and not yet twenty. A shimmering girl with polished nails and a soft creamy face, who washed her white blonde hair with pink strawberry shampoo. When she was little, her hair caught fire and her older sister poured water over her ...”

“... Everything feels soft to my hands useless with cold in this high-style country cottage, a retreat for painters and musicians in summer. I put them up and feel my father’s head, his thinning, pliant hair and scalloped temples – there to threaten or impress women, I once read, with the frontal bone of intellect ... The central heating clicks on, and the warm air shoots straight up into the triangular apex of the studio, against twenty feet of northlight, now darkness and fog ...”

“... Then morning comes, saying: ‘This was a night.’ Robert Lowell Broken knights. – No, not like that. Well, no matter. Something agreeably Tennysonian (is there Any other kind?) About ‘broken knights’. Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere. In my one-piece pyjamas – My it doesn’t matter suit, With necessarily non-matching – Matchless, makeless, makeles – Added top, I pad Downstairs to look At the green time On the digital microwave ...”