“He might as well have been talking English, for all Mae understood him.”

“He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.”

“He was the only person awake, but he might as well have been alone and dreaming.”

“... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.”

“For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.”

“But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents’ generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.”