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“... senior civil servants or army officers above the rank of sergeant. Although it was still making vast sums for Belgian commercial interests, the country was bankrupt, and almost immediately it began to fall apart. The Army mutinied in a raping and looting free-for-all. Belgian paratroopers responded with indiscriminate brutality, evacuating the white settler ...”

“... the war effort. The disappointment felt by those immigrants who arrived in England hoping, in V.S. Naipaul’s words, to ‘find the centre’, to share in the might and vertebration of a triumphant colonial power rather than live out palsied and prefabricated lives on marginal islands has been rehearsed so many times that it is now a commonplace. Yet their ...”

“... Biswas, of course, reads Dickens with great delight, and Dickens has been influential not only on Naipaul but on Muriel Spark, on Angus Wilson (detrimentally, I would say), on Angela Carter, on Rushdie and Amis, even on Zadie Smith. The interest in grotesque portraiture, in caricature over character, has been wildly Dickensian. A discussion of why this has ...”

“... an all-male establishment lifted straight from Pall Mall.And there was the Gezira Sporting Club, a vast pleasure ground occupying the southern half of Zamalek, an island on the Nile: 150 acres of gardens with lawns green and fresh as any in the Home Counties, hosed with Nile water every evening by servants in white gallabeas; polo fields, an 18-hole golf ...”