The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing
He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired....
She kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.
After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live N...
The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.
And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.
Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we’re lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.
He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicab...
Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.
I can’t bear the smell of cigars, can you? said Lady Partridge. Lionel hates it too, murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of...
It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived—we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.
Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman’s smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.
In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a num...
Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.
I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover.
'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew f...
It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its...
As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time.
Showing 21 to 40 of 62 results