Catch-22

Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.

22 love most is precisely what, from the Flaubertian

Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one.

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

‘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.

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.

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.’

History did not demand Yossarian’s premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it.