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“... Walter Benjamin was not a letter writer of the order of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity ...”

“... Dan Jacobson grew up in the diamond town of Kimberley, South Africa. England was one of the places he looked to for inspiration. As it turned out, his interest in English literature and his habit of falling on copies of the New Statesman were ways of sending ahead. From his description of Kimberley on a Saturday afternoon in Time and Time Again (1985), it is obvious why he hankered for another life, the further away the better: Helpless with boredom, stupefied by their own nullity, town and sky yawned at one another ...”

“... scene re-enacted by farmers, eight thousand feet above the steaming seaboard.’ That is how Evelyn Waugh, who passed through Kenya at the beginning of the Thirties, was nostalgically to recall what he had found there. This sentence is not quoted in White Mischief, though Waugh’s name is invoked a couple of times in the book, and its title alludes to ...”