2 Quotes by Geoffrey Dutton

You can make initial contact with someone who does not speak your language with signs or smiles, but to communicate you need words. So it is with a nation; to understand it you have to read its books.

The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends.