Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, refo...
He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff butto...
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in...
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the hea...
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance...
The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that p...
Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
Since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.
Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.
I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man...
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life.
So here I am, upside down in a woman.
She lay in the dark and knew everything.