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There was, for instance, the compulsion to return to the calamity of Liu’s child—to deplore it yet again, or replay it with a happy ending. Getting away with something—the narrow squeak—is, he had always realised, a strong theme of life and art: powerful because it creates suspense. One never quite…

“Yes. And, like the earth, old and dirty. I got it back in a box of ‘effects,’ as they call it, when I was in England in’45. They’d been stored in Lincolnshire, in a barn near Branston where we spent the nights before the battle.” He said, “Getting the box, opening it, I myself as next of kin recei…

Helen was to go alone to her parents’ rooms, where Benedict would also be brought and lunch would be prepared. The Driscolls, man and wife, were leaving for some commemorative occasion—there was often an event of the kind, which they unfailingly attended, leaving Dench in charge. Thus, at the top o…

Because of the kiss, she might have liked to consider the evening a turning point, momentous. But, with the ill-timed precision of women in such matters, only felt what was lacking. Something that either of them could have put a name to.

The mother said, “Aldred has a tender heart.”

The youth blushed. “Not tender enough, perhaps.”

Raimonda pushed a fugitive pea in his direction. “Tender enough. But reluctant to show.”

And this was a girl he had kissed with abandon.

“One was raised that way. Schools strict. Parents n…