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“... since repudiated the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (four words, four lies, as he later told Milan Kundera). His opposition to the USSR and his support of workers’ uprisings in Eastern Europe were bones of contention with Sartre, who later admitted that Castoriadis had been ‘right, but at the wrong time’: Castoriadis riposted, fairly ...”

“... or, worse, to beautify it – would be dishonest. It would be kitsch – and kitsch, as Milan Kundera said, is premised on the ‘denial of shit’. The language was coarse, even ugly, but, as Ibrahim wrote in the preface: ‘Wasn’t a bit of ugliness necessary to expose an equivalent ugliness in “physiological” acts like beating an ...”

“... Barbusse, whose hero lives for the moment he sees a girl’s skirt lift in the wind. A writer like Milan Kundera (not one of Wilson’s outsiders) gets away (just) with making women walk naked up and down his pages because he writes about the fact of fantasy: he knows what he’s doing. Douglas Adams, on the other hand, in one of his later novels, has a ...”

“... but with the fact of social derealisation: the lightness of the unreal under Communist regimes for Milan Kundera, who proposed this sense of the term before the fall of the Wall, yet under capitalist regimes for the rest of us. This kind of lightness is no ideal at all; it is ‘unbearable’. Perhaps in the end the two notions of lightness must be ...”

“... thinking, which has always been difficult for the novel. The genre thrives on irony and play, as Milan Kundera repeatedly remarks, and T.S. Eliot meant to praise Henry James by suggesting he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. We might say the same of dozens of other novelists. Plenty of ideas, but none of them nailed down, all of them ...”

“... But the pressure of literary theory seems particularly regrettable in David Lodge’s essay on Milan Kundera. Much of it is an interesting, useful account of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Lodge thinks it necessary to spend several pages working out his notion that ‘the modernist novel is generally characterised by a radical ...”

“... was bureaucratic Communism. There is a parallel here with that other Eastern European heretic, Milan Kundera. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera speaks of a contrast between the ‘angelic’ and the ‘demonic’, the former signifying too much meaning and the latter too little. Totalitarian states are ...”

“... on adding to their linguistic crane bag: Michael Henry Heim, who worked on slippery ironists (Milan Kundera, then writing in Czech, and Dubravka Ugrešić, then writing in Serbo-Croat, now known as Croatian), liked to acquire a new one every year or so and to get to grip with that language’s neglected authors. But translators agree that their art ...”

“... to seem both cursory and overdone. It’s not that drama and analysis are sworn enemies – Milan Kundera, for instance, specialises in the mid-novel seminar. But in his case when the action resumes it has been enriched rather than neutralised. The tension​ between father and son can’t be allowed to stand and so a further opportunity to break ...”

“... scattereth her poppy.’ It is the oblivion of iniquity that defines our contemporary predicament. Milan Kundera is one of those writers from Eastern Europe who are able to read our political fortunes for us with special clarity. It is entirely appropriate that his Book of Laughter and Forgetting should be obsessed with that very Orwellian ...”

“... recognisability. So Lost for Words can be acquitted of being a roman à clef, the type of novel Milan Kundera compared to a jacket that everyone immediately turns inside out, since the lining is the only interesting part. St Aubyn’s chair of judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert ...”

“... claims and accusations. ‘People are always shouting that they want to create a better future,’ Milan Kundera once wrote. ‘It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the ...”

“... Many are the occasions that inspire such mortified hindsight. Exemplary in its comedy is the Milan summit of the European Council in 1984, which ensured the inclusion of qualified majority voting in the Single European Act. ‘Signor Craxi could not have been more sweetly reasonable’: ‘I came away thinking how easy it had been to get my points ...”

“... his brilliantined hair, maroon socks and Adolphe Menjou moustache, who calls on the editors of a Milan publishing house and reveals to them his discovery of a coded message about a Templar plan, centuries old and of diabolical complexity, which could tap a mystic source of power far greater than atomic energy. Living as they do in the world of books, ghost ...”

“... with public self-exposure and suspicious of ‘reticence or obliquity’. But we all have what Milan Kundera calls the ‘epidermal instinct to defend one’s personal life’. Never mind the front door, back door, garage door, car door (and the petrol cap), or the safe, or the desk drawer containing your life insurance policy, just think of how many ...”