As so often when Mr Rhodes gets grateful and reverent, you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once. - Martin Amis

In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.

Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.

September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.