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“... great things. Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. The character relieving himself of this little confession is a garrulous cobbler, who admits to being ‘an admirer of the European Renaissance’, and is the narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. But many of ...”

“... Things​ have not gone quiet around the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, even though he has been dead since February 1997, when he defenestrated himself from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital, à la mode tchèque. There were some no doubt well-meaning reports that he had fallen while trying to feed the pigeons, but these should be discounted ...”

“... The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal recently argued that great literature has no need of symbols: it simply presents life as it is. A symbol in a novel can act like a leech on a living body, sucking the imaginative reality from it. I am talking here not of a smattering of metaphorical language at the micro-level (as in the previous sentence), but of the way in which artsy modernist writers (it’s amazingly easy to start sounding like Sir Kingsley Amis once you start following this line of thought) load their novels with pretentious structures of symbolism instead of getting on with the business of telling stories about ‘life as it is ...”

“... it a few days ago. It is incomparable in its simplicity. The original story is by a Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal. It should certainly be translated into English. It does not diminish its grandeur that there was very little sabotage by the Czechs during the Second World War. It is very rare for me to see a film and even rarer to see two quite close ...”

“... is Hill’s twentieth collection. It takes its title from an odd detail about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who ‘fell to his death from a hotel balcony, while apparently feeding the pigeons’, as Hill related in an interview last year: ‘They always, always, always say … “apparently” … That’s interesting and sad.’ Much turns on how ...”

“... Almost, at times, the Fool. Ishiguro’s Prufrock is a memorable portrait of futility. Bohumil Hrabal’s little Prague waiter is a much more lightweight servant in every sense. I served the King of England is a freewheeling journey through Bohemia and Magical Realism, and also – in the most flippant and irreverent way – through Czech ...”

“... a ‘secret society of bicyclists’ which includes – those I’ve heard of – Mircea Eliade, Bohumil Hrabal, Eugène Ionesco, Eddy Merckx, Slobodan Milosevic´, Gavrilo Princip, Jozef Skvorecki, Tsvetan Todorov and, perplexingly, Alexis Carrington from Dynasty. These names speak to those in the know, with a complicated take on the obsession that ...”

“... and purposes’. (The Kundera-Austen coupling is one of several bizarre marriages in this book; Bohumil Hrabal would surely have offered the obvious alternative to Kundera: natural, comic, unself-conscious and Czech.) Betjeman, Wodehouse, Austen, Anthony Powell and Larkin are all examples, for Bayley, of this kind of evasive magic, which is opposed ...”

“... Pirandello, and of Pavese’s novels; or of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy; of Bohumil Hrabal; of Christina Stead; of Henry Green’s Loving; or of V.S. Pritchett’s short stories – Pritchett, who was told by H.G. Wells in the 1930s that the working classes could not be written about without comedy and condescension. All these ...”