I didn’t want to press Veronica. I thought I’d wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, fo...
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much...
I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’ ‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed.
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
He didn’t go to church. He read The Times and the Telegraph. He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life.
For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out-perhaps especially when it doesn't work out-promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life.
Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we...
First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years.
Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak,
Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? because love is the meeting p...
Die Bücher sagen: Sie hat es getan, weil. Das Leben sagt: Sie hat es getan. In den Büchern werden einem die Dinge erklärt; im Leben nicht. Es überrascht mich nicht, dass manche Leute Bücher vorziehen....
But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.
But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the con...
Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: If you lower your expectations, you can’t be disappointed. This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a...
And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism.
And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the realization that most love, even the most ardent and...
An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person.
Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends...
Most people didn’t experience the sixties until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by...
Melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance),