" Laszlo's histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe - languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it. "

― Penelope Lively , Moon Tiger