She went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth, as if everyone had immemorially kn… - Martin Amis

after.” In the Preface to Volume Three he is less severe, and more persuasive: the Communist regime survived “not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West.” Among the elements of the state’s strength was its capacity to astonish, to dumbfound — and thus to delude. As Conquest says, “the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable . His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.

Who let the dogs in? ...This, we fear, is going to be the question. Who let the dogs in? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who?