Hughes spends a lot of time in this book saying what his country never had, and still hasn't got. Actually it's got it, because it's got Hughes. He s… - Clive James

On the surface of the water, a midge vanishes into a hungry ripple. I'm not ready yet. He wonders why, at his age and having come so far, he still feels that. The culmination of his luck is that he will never feel any other way.

Australian TV is so bad it is almost impossible to describe. If you have seen American television and can imagine it without its redeeming features, then Australian TV is even worse than that.

[I]t makes no sense whatsoever to call the perpetrators of the Holocaust 'the Germans' if by that is meant that the German victims of Naziism – including many Jews who went on regarding themselves as Germans to the end of the line – somehow weren’t Germans at all. That’s what the Nazis thought, and to echo their harebrained typology is to concede them their victory.