After many rearrangings — his eyes all the while swiveling metronomically between the package on the stranger's lap and the stranger's absent gaze — he at last settled, brow knit with dissatisfaction, on an order that would temporarily suffice […]

He is dab-handed at cricket.

I’ been invited to the USSR (in the days when I was a fellow-traveller or travelleress), to the commemoration of a titanic Caucasian poet by the name of Rustaveli.

Let the great gods, / That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads, / Find out their enemies now.