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“... How do you fight this monster? Three years into the new century, you pick up a handful of stones from the street. You secrete boxcutters and wires. A penknife lies warm in your hand. You wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, go out of the house and explode. The generals have an inexhaustible arsenal of names: ‘imperialist villains . . . criminals ...”

“... Every city has its minority, with its ironical, tiny village fortressed against the barbarians, the giant ransacks and the pillage of the larger faith. In England, for instance, the ‘Asians’ cling to their ways as they never do in their own land. On the other hand, the Englishman strays from his time-worn English beliefs. Go to an ‘Asian’ street in London, and you will find a ritual of life that refuses to compete with the unschooled world outside ...”

“... an episode from the ‘Ramayana’ retold by Amit Chaudhuri She’d been watching the two men for a while, and the pale, rather docile wife with vermilion in her hair, who sometimes went inside the small house and came out again. She’d been watching from behind a bush, so they hadn’t seen her; they had the air of being not quite travellers, nor people who’d been settled for long; but they looked too composed to be fugitives ...”

“... is something that most colonial writers have experienced, and some, such as V.S. Naipaul and Nirad Chaudhuri, have written about vividly. The experience of the transformation of literature into reality can be as magical and mysterious as the transformation of reality into literature. At the same time, there is a scepticism, a sardonic down-to-earthness, that ...”

“... The Parsis of Bombay are pale, sometimes hunched, but always with long noses. They have a posthumous look which is contradicted by an earthiness that makes them use local expletives from a very early age; and a bad temper which one takes to be the result of the incestuous intermarriages of a small community. The Parsi boys in my class had legendary Persian names like Jehangir and Kaikobad and Khusro ...”

“... Naguib Mahfouz made his name with his trilogy of Cairo life – Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street – first published in Arabic in the late Fifties. At first glance, The Harafish, which was originally published in 1977, bears little resemblance to, say, Palace Walk. The latter is a story of a family in an ‘alley’ in Cairo in the first half of the 20th century, and is told in a straightforward chronological manner that seems to owe something to the 19th-century European novel ...”

“... over the Sarayu Bridge.’ Of course, the academy took its own revenge on these writers. Nirad Chaudhuri remarks how, in the early decades of the 20th century, the Bengali paper at Calcutta University quoted passages from Tagore and instructed examinees to render them into ‘chaste Bengali’. Narayan has been largely neglected in post-colonial English ...”

“... We have read all about Hindu revivalism in newspapers, and seen the pictures on television; one’s personal feelings about it cannot be separated from the information the media give us. When I returned to Calcutta for two months in mid-January, I listened to all the arguments given by people one had always thought of as ‘liberal’, a category as vague as ‘normal’, for and against Hindu fundamentalism ...”

“... This book begins to narrate its story, or stories, with the picture on the jacket; the story has begun, then, even before we’ve reached the first page. After a dedication to the author’s parents, we encounter a quotation from Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo, which expresses, deadpan, the following view on flying, or weightlessness, or ‘hovering in the air’: ‘Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air ...”

“... The story begins one afternoon, ‘three years after the beginning of the new century’ (the 20th). A figure on a horse appears on mountainous terrain. This is Ronald Forrester, dust ‘clogging the pores on his pink perspiring English face’. Hari Kunzru, Forrester’s creator, didn’t have to look too far for his character’s name: Forrester works with trees ...”

“... of inclusiveness towards the Muslim vote-bank. But after Narendra Modi and his terrifying henchman Amit Shah’s divisive campaign, it perhaps wasn’t really surprising that all of us (none of us loyal to any particular political party) found ourselves celebrating the result along with countless others. In the event, the BJP and its allies won only 58 seats ...”

“... In 1978, a short while before Robyn Davidson returned to England to write Tracks, her book about ‘traversing the deserts of Australia through tribal Aboriginal land’, she visited India. ‘I don’t know how or why I ended up in the medieval lanes of Pushkar, in Rajasthan, during one of the most important festivals in the Hindu calendar. But I’m almost sure I was the only European around ...”

“... The narrator of After Silence is Max Fischer, the famous cartoonist. At the Los Angeles County Museum, where his work is on display, his life collides with that of Lily Aaron, a divorcee with a son called Lincoln. Lily shows a womanly sophistication and cynical maturity that one presumes must come from her past experiences of ‘things not working out’, and a disarming, sentimental girlishness which surely must have betrayed her into a bad marriage in the first place ...”

“... Like Suketu Mehta, I was born in Calcutta, a city ‘in extremis’, in Mehta’s words, and, like him, grew up in Bombay. His father, who worked in the diamond trade, and mine, then a rising corporate executive, probably moved to Bombay from Calcutta for the same reasons; to do with the flight, in the 1960s, of capital and industry from the former colonial capital in the east to the forward-looking metropolis in the west, in the face of growing labour unrest and radical politics in leftist Bengal – the troubled context that ‘in extremis’ presumably refers to ...”

“... He glanced at his watch and made an attempt to finish the tea in his cup; he was waiting for a call, and it was his second cup of tea. Five minutes later, the phone began to ring. ‘Pramathesh?’ said the voice at the other end; and he could tell, from its slight note of insouciance and boredom, that it was Ranjit. ‘I was waiting for your call, old man,’ he said, trying to muffle his irritation with his usual show of joviality ...”