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[...] Towards the end of the book, when Patrick's narrative increasingly tends to shiver and shake around the edges, the litany of designer names begins to falter: shoes by "Susan Warren Bennis Edwards" becomes shoes by "Warren Susan Allen Edmonds" and then shoes by "Edward Susan Bennis Allen". For…

[...] that still leaves the problem of trying to define when the author himself has decided to distance himself from events. He might, for example, mistrust women but presumably he wasn't in favour of popping out people's eyeballs? This put the critic in the ludicrous position of, firstly, supplyin…

[...] It was hardly surprising that a novel which unequivocally condemned a way of life to which many people had sacrificed their youth and energy was tepidly received; journalists were as much at the mercy of the status-driven conspicuous consumption of the eighties as anyone else and the forth ov…

[...] the bespectacled transvestitite in Singapore who, when asked to name the best restaurant in a town justly celebrated for its unique combination of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian delicacies, answers, without a moment's hesitation, 'Denny's.' [...]

The critic Edward Said has pointed out the ironies of placing Eastern and Western voices in such rigid opposition, and has unravelled them in such a way as to show that this strategy is a kind of philosophical imperialism -- an imposition of Western images about the East onto the East. America …