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.

The world's major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.

America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town - from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford - America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.

I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.