'He thought that he had detected, in the voice with which she had framed her last couple of questions, the old familiar female clang, that broken sound as of a thin cracked bell which all women emitted when they felt threatened but wanted to appear confident.'

'The linguists and philologists of his previous acquaintance had easily succeeded in backing him into a false position of patriotic insularity; with that temporary, alien look in their eyes and their coffee filters and their French wives in constant need of whispered idiomatic bolstering ...'

Howard Jacobson, Coming from Behind