Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed – all he’s got to do is thump on the drum, and there’s his response.

One seeks to contravene one’s perceptions – why? So that one can wander utterly lost, without signposts or guide?

He shouted excitedly, ‘I’m explaining Fascist theory of action!’

You and I – we have no awareness of the vast number of uneducated. They can obtain from mould-produced identical objects a joy which would be denied to us.

gnomish quality about everything. A smaller-than-life quality, with a dash of the droll. What is this five-thousand-year-old book? The Mickey Mouse watch, Mr Tagomi himself, the fragile cup in Mr Tagomi’s hand … and, on the wall facing Mr Baynes, an enormous buffalo head, ugly and menacing.

all connected in this moment of casting the yarrow stalks to select the exact wisdom appropriate in a book begun in the thirtieth century B.C.

They are, like everything in life – as the philosophy of Tao makes clear – interconnected.

Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.

He could recognize it as Hexagram Fifteen. Ch’ien. Modesty. Ah. The