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When I was at school my teachers used to get mad at me because I never did any work, & later the Fossil used to throw up his hands in horror because I’d never read Racine or Balzac or anyone like that, he’d start talking about the musician as homme cultivé — I used to say to him, If you would like …

There is a text which I could insert at this point which begins ‘I’m not in the mood,’ but the reader who has had occasion to consult it will know that, though open to many variations, there is one form which is, as Voltaire would say, potius optandum quam probandum, and that is the one which runs …

X and I are smiling. We are both charmed by the flowered velvet. X’s hand moves up my thigh. I have noticed this tendency to reductionism in X before. The text is infinitely variegated, the subtext always the same. I tried once to resist this by accusing X of believing in final causes — that for th…

Gil had met Rachel in the gift shop of the Van Gogh Museum in the heat of the hype. She had picked up a paperback, Vincent Van Gogh, een leven in brieven.

He had seen her across a room but kept his distance. If you have never been to Amsterdam before and maybe never will be again you don’t want …

It’s true. You definitely got the feeling, holding these objects, that they had been in a room with a crazy guy, or rather a guy with the potential to be crazy who was trying to keep madness at bay. The writing was small and precise and clear, this slightly pedantic European handwriting that you wo…