Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.

The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.

Tom Stoppard Quotes