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“... Canterbury), and Certainly not mediocre. But neither were Dennis Compton, Freddy Trueman or Ian Botham, or indeed Graham Gooch, and they were (are) all very much Players. In his autobiography, breezily ghost-written by Martin Johnson, the joker of the Independent’s back page, Gower plays up his Cavalier image for all its worth. And he makes no bones ...”

“... The Meiji period: 44 years (1868-1912) of ‘Civilisation and Enlightenment’, of steam-trains, long-nosed barbarians, crystal chandeliers, fancy-dress balls and wars fought in Hungarian cavalry uniforms. There is something highly theatrical about the ‘modernisation’ of Japan, which began with a dazzling (words like ‘dazzling’ always come to mind when discussing Meiji) crash-course in Western culture and ended in a defensive re-evaluation of traditions that would never be the same again ...”

“... The story of Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro and his Unit 731 should stand as a warning – not so much against human wickedness, about which little can be done, but against gullibility. Unlike his German colleague Dr Mengele, who was a bit of a hack, Dr Ishii was a respected scholar in his field – which was military medicine, or more specifically, biological warfare ...”

“... Is the Japanese Prime Minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, a racist? Or must we read his recent remarks about the superior intelligence of a monoracial society like Japan, and unlike the United States, in context, as his defenders claim? If so, in what context? The physical context was a seminar for the Japanese equivalent of the Young Conservatives. Nakasone’s statements were clearly not meant for foreign ears ...”

“... Three episodes, three wars: The Allied armies took possession of Tientsin and Peking and the adjoining districts. At first many of the soldiers of the composite body acted in a brutal and licentious way. Men, women and children were outraged and murdered and cities looted ... Some foreigners came to the captured districts for loot: a most disgraceful episode ...”

“... relentlessly any of their fellow-countrymen tactless enough to argue that they were anything else. Ian Buruma has written a penetrating comparative study of the way in which the Germans and the Japanese have come to terms with the record of their conduct in the Second World War. There are interesting similarities and even more interesting differences. For ...”

“... job of interpretation properly were it not for the published work of academics. One such man is Ian Buruma. Educated in the Netherlands but writing in English, Buruma is known for his work on the Far Eastern Economic Review and in the New York Times, and as the author of A Japanese Mirror, a racy book on the Japanese ...”

“... got Theo. The heart stands still.’ It was, and remains, a shocking and horrible moment. Ian Buruma was born in The Hague in 1951, close to where Van Gogh grew up, and emigrated from the Netherlands in 1975, moving on to spend time in Japan and the East, as well as in the US and Britain. He is the sort of intelligent, calm and reasonable ...”

“... and left it as a sharp earful of what Paul Auster calls ‘the music of chance’.Salaman, Buruma and Auster are all connoisseurs of the incongruous connection, all adept stringers-along of the reader into tantalisingly incomplete networks of significance. Salaman is a practised psychological construction-man, a builder-up of considered trifles into ...”

“... The idea behind these changes is one that was dear to Voltaire’s heart and inspires the title of Ian Buruma’s book: the notion that those institutions which have proved successful in one country, in this case Britain, might, like coconuts, be transplanted elsewhere with the same positive results. Dogged by a combination of chronically unstable ...”

“... during his membership of the German Communist Party. In the catalogue for George Grosz in Berlin, Ian Buruma writes that he was a ‘great poseur’ and that his communist phase is best understood as just another of his acts: not for a moment was Grosz ‘driven by a need to capture the exploitation of the proletariat on paper’. Like Bob Dylan, ...”

“... Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, with its samurai butler. According to Ian Buruma, there is a Japanese folk-tale motif in which a character finds and makes use of a magic mask only to discover, when the time comes to remove it, that the mask has become stuck to his face. That is the plot of Ishiguro’s book. One can imagine ...”

“... for traces and echoes of the kind of violence that came out of the closet in the war. Talking to Ian Buruma in the New Yorker, Murakami said that when he was a boy he heard his father (whom he doesn’t get on with) reveal something terrible about his experience as a soldier in China, but he couldn’t remember later what it was: ‘I don’t want to ...”

“... as an international writer too. From early on he found many readers across East Asia, which Ian Buruma – who profiled him for the New Yorker in 1996 – attributes to large numbers of lonely city dwellers leading atomised, post-traditional lives. ‘He told me that he couldn’t write about his native roots,’ ...”

“... who is as guilty as Mishima of exhibiting an exotic, export-oriented Japan; and the critic Ian Buruma, whose quick wit and knowledge of Japanese ‘cannot compensate for his glibness and prejudgment, which barely conceal his fundamental ignorance and contempt’. Miyoshi’s own judgment is sometimes as suspect as it is severe. It seems ...”