Justin Cartwright

“It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.”

“As Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers' rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women.”

“It was my idea to do a two-hour course of barista training. I was keen to learn how to finish off my coffee with a picture of a heart or a palm tree or, perhaps, a swan.”

“I love Franschhoek, and straight off the plane, I went to the incomparable Quartier Francais, on the main street, for breakfast. This small hotel and restaurant is regularly near the top of every poll for best hotel and restaurant in Africa.”

“'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.”

“I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think 'Pigeon Feathers' was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.”

“'The Infinities' is a shortish book but densely loaded with Nabokovian slyness, gorgeous imagery, and disturbing insights into what it means to be mortal.”

“In his later years, Ramakrishna took up residence at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, from where his radiance extended far, even beyond his death in 1886.”

“You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.”

“The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people.”

“The successful advertising agent is the one who can convince the clients that he knows something they don't.”

“My own interest in Kafka's letter came about when I was writing an article on Peter Ginz, the boy novelist held in Terezin, not far from Prague, and exterminated in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The Ginz family were from more or less the same milieu as the Kafkas.”

“I thought that, post-apartheid, there would be absolutely no interest in South Africa. That has been both true and untrue. The major writers like Gordimer and Coetzee have produced major books. But some of the more minor writers have drifted away.”

“'Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising' by Winston Fletcher - the impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant but ultimately shallow business.”

“Jim Crace's novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives.”

“This is the strange thing about South Africa - for all its corruption and crime, it seems to offer a stimulating sense that anything is possible.”

“I have worshipped Berlin from the day I read 'Two Concepts of Liberty' in South Africa. It seemed to make it respectable to be a liberal.”

“'The Cauliflower' is full of these bizarre anecdotes, some of them petty, others moving or whimsical, as its many characters try to make sense of the universe in which they live - a universe strange, febrile, and utterly unique.”

“Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that 'many of us have a road that reaches back into our past'. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 - as he subtitles his book, the 'Highway to the Sun'.”

“In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.”