People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home. - Martin Amis

The 20th century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows no sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys — who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.

Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect.