Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. ‘You haven’t got a chance, kid,’ he told him glumly. ‘They hate Jews.’ ‘But I’m not Jewish,’ answered Clevinger. ‘It will make no difference,’ Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. ‘They’re after everybody.’

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What could you say to him?

His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition.

‘Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?’

He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning.

22 love most is precisely what, from the Flaubertian

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.